He Once Grazed Cattle — Now He’s Using AI to Save His Mother Tongue

Many ancient and native languages in India have long struggled to maintain their identity within the larger and ever-changing linguistic ecosystem of the country. One of them has been the Ho language, spoken by the tribal communities in Jharkhand and Odisha. But thanks to artificial intelligence, the language is finding a new lease of life.

Dr Bikram Biruly, a scholar who once grazed cattle while practising his native script on a slate, is now pioneering the use of AI to preserve his mother tongue.

Biruly, whose work was reported in the Indian Express, hails from the Matkam Sahi village in Odisha's Mayurbhanj district - a place you would not usually find on Google Maps.

Last month, he was given a hero's welcome when he returned to his village after completing his PhD, becoming the first ever person to apply AI to the language spoken by roughly 1.4 million people in the country.

For his doctoral research, Biruly trained an AI model built on a dataset of about 20,000 sentences that he converted into the native Ho Warang Kshiti script. His system focuses on three key areas: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to transcribe spoken Ho, Entity Recognition to classify words like names and places, and Part of Speech (POS) tagging to understand grammar.

Biruly's work marks a significant step for the Ho Adivasi community, which has long advocated for its language to be included in the Eighth Schedule of India’s Constitution.

Gaining this status would grant it official protection alongside 22 languages currently recognised.

However, the language faces cultural threats and in many parts of Odisha, a popular slang is 'Ulloh ku jete sijheile sijhibo nahi, Kulho ku jete bujheile bujhibo nahi', which roughly translates to uloh, a hard-to-boil vegetable, never softens, no matter how long you cook it, the Ho will never understand what you say, no matter how much you try.

To combat these stereotypes, Biruly now aims to implement his AI model and approach India’s Ministry of Tribal Affairs, in an attempt to integrate Ho onto digital platforms like the government’s Adi Vaani app and Google Translate.