The Agency Areas near the Visakhapatnam district, India are populated by the Kondha, Chenchu and Gadaba Tribes. Amidst the flourishing coffee plantations and astounding greenery, the straw roof hamlets, resonate a culture, share of warmth, lullabies of seasons in a beautiful language, a creole of Gadaba, that the tribal adapted and owned over times. It has a mixture of vocabulary from the local language Telugu and Austroasiatic language Gadaba. Languages have always caught my instinctive attention and stimulated my curiosity to get introduced to them. Telugu has been the language I am living with, that connects the dots of my emotional space. English is that beautiful language through which I would love to see my thoughts speak. Turning the dice on Sanskrit, it is the language of spiritual consciousness, I turn to, for diving inwards.
The fondest of memories of my childhood, were those summer times I get to visit my Grandparents in Rajupakalu, a small hilltop hamlet in the thick forests of Eastern Ghats of Chintapalle mandal, in the agency area near Visakhapatnam, India. Beyond the soulful suppers, carefree nap times on my grandma’s lap, the memories of my childhood are marked with beautiful coffee plantations and a warm tribal language Gadaba creole spoken in my village. The innocence, freshness and the cultural aspect of the language has always awe-struck me. The closely knit tribal building a habitat and heritage in the deep forests is a treasure of human civilizations adding a feather to diversity in the way we live. Today, with development and communication prioritizing monotonous and simplified means with global languages dominating the trade and employment sectors, minority languages have been affected the most. People started abandoning their native and ancestral languages and shifting towards the dominant language spoken in their study/workplace. The Gadaba language, which was once predominantly spoken in my village, is now heard sporadically and has become an endangered language. The youth of the village have completely alienated the language, and a very few people are still holding onto its nuances. Being a spoken language with no written form, the future of Gadaba is even more compromised. There is an urgent need of reviving and protecting the endangered spoken tribal language Gadaba by deriving the vocabulary, syntax, semantics of the Gadaba Language from its spoken form retrieved from the native speakers of Gadaba Language. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have enabled speech models that can learn the world’s uncommon languages with low resource speech data and which lack the large amount of transcribed speech needed to train algorithms. My research incorporates a host of concepts inclusive of phonetics, speech recognition, linguistic distance, emotional intelligence with the focal point at reviving the language of the tribal of Rajupakalu.