Preserving Rohingya language & Heritage by MD Noor @Dweb.

 

Preserving Rohingya language & Heritage by MD Noor @Dweb

So I will introduce myself. My name is Mohammed Noor. I'm based in Malaysia at the moment, but I'm originally from Arakan, Burma, and I'm a Rohingya myself. I have been working for the community for the last 20, 25 years on different initiative. One of them is the language preservation. Rohingya language has been equally suppressed by the Burmese regime for last many decades, which result that the Rohingya have not been able to access their own language, thrive that language, learn and read and so and so forth. Along with that, most of the Rohingya which has been forced out of Burma and now we can safely say I guess 80 or 90 % of them are driven out. There's about 4 million people and barely there's only 3, 400,000 left in sight. There's about 1.5 over a million in Bangladesh and Malaysia and there's no census on that as well, how many people have died on the boat going to Malaysia, Thailand and many of these countries. Alongside there's early migration who have left during 60s and 70s like my family members to Saudi Arabia. to UAE and Pakistan as well, so on that part of the region. Having said that, this genocide has been such a horrific and such a long, which has destroyed so many things. One of the things that is destroyed is also the culture of Rohingya, the cultural genocide. So the cultural genocide, what it means is that the Rohingya themselves have no idea about their own heritage, about their own language, about their own root. about their own land and most importantly about their own culture as well. So there's a lot of broken pieces in all of this. So what I am trying to do is number one, how can we fix the language and make it accessible so that people, that's where the digitization process of the languages started back in 1995. So first I digitized the Rohingya language in the year 2000, building a keyboard, building a font, so putting it accessible in sort of computer. And then later in 2012, When then we put it proposal together to Unicode so that the language can be Unicoded and the journey continues. Then in 20, it took us about seven years, six plus years to get it Unicoded. After that we started to look for adoption. It was first adopted by Android in version 11 where Rohingya can be read but cannot be written. Then I started to build again a Unicode keyboard and a font so that they can be used. Later, Google picked it up and then developed a phone called Notosan in the Notosan family. And moving forward, then the iOS has adapted it today. So the iOS has actually built a keyboard and all this. And any iPhone today, you can actually pick it up and access their own language, which actually gives a huge slap to the Burmese government and the authority. They wanted us to be eradicated and from this earth so that we do not exist. So we started to exist and flourish and many. And since then, there's a lot of people that started to build the content. we also, here's no internet connection I was trying to do because what I wanted to show you was now a lot of people actually able to read and write on a comment on Facebook, YouTube, and then we have multiple website. Rohingya language that is now thriving. One of the initiatives that I have is called Rohingya Vision, which is a media outlet run in three different languages. One of them is Rohingya written in Rohingya. So if you want to have a taste of it, this is a seal that I made in the Rohingya language. You can just pass around and have a look at it. This is what I'm going to put. So this is a Rohingya language which is unicoded. And now not only we are writing it, but we are trying to write on wood. We're trying to engrave it into metals and making like rings and stamps and whatever the possibilities are. So this is how the map of Arakan, indigenous land of Akin, can have a taste and how you can see how it looks, the writing system and all this. So this is all part of preservation, part of, and most importantly, this has actually elevated Rohingya community in many different levels. Janice, yes? Right to left or left to right? Right to left. Right to left. you. Right to left. So it's such a great pleasure for a lot of community members who have been living and hiding in exile to see their own language thrives and, you know, we are talking to a number of organizations so that we can do some sort of building an online translation dictionary or anything so that from English to Rohingya, from Rohingya to English, so more content can be built. I was talking to OpenAI that how can we build a language model that can scrape all the Rohingya data so we have a lot of video, audio, text, so that can be converted into, put some sort of AI interface and maybe start to build curriculums, start to build educational material. I having said that so this is all part so last year I spoke about decentralized identity but I'm not really focusing on 

that because identity for Rohingya is not only decentralized one identity is the culture preserving all of the other element of Rohingya is also part of identity Which is their culture tradition language all of it all together part of the that we have built an archive which are going to be soon accessible and open archive that contemplate or that has has horizon of can or a feel of what is a Rohingya culture is all about.So the Burmese destroyed basically entire entire Rohingya culture. So we have did a lot of categorization in Rohingya culture. So let's say language in language how many material we have on text or audio or video. And we have such a beautiful proverbs and dictionaries and many of these people have actually forgot the third and fourth generation who are living in different parts of the world. And then moving forward, the culture. So we have different traditions because now a genocide victim they cannot practice all this tradition. How a daughter treat father, what kind of ceremony we have. There's so many different types of ceremonies, different types of clothes, different types of seasonal foods, different types of songs, and many, many, many of those things that has the ability basically to tell Rohingya themselves who are Rohingya and what is their culture and how this tradition thrives. So one is reconstructing or maybe reclaiming claiming all those and also giving the hope to the community that we can live, we can thrive because it's a huge generational trauma for the people that have been killed and murdered and raped and burned their villages to see a lot of developments. So now there's a number of things that have been started to for last actually couple of two years. There's a lot of Rohingya developers that started to build more. mobile application for different different things, reading books, maybe a number of them have started to some keyboards and different different design of fonts. So people have started to experiment many number of things you can see that you know a lot of things are thriving and flourishing within the community especially the young generation trying to build animation, video, video editing, trying to build Rohingya courses, how do you edit videos in Rohingya. So this is something really, really new for the community, for a marginalized community. and lastly, what I want to say is that, this is, so Rohingya project becomes a glue, in a sense, in a decentralized way, not so that we don't do all the work, but we ask the community in different parts of the world to start look based on their interests. If you are interested in language, build tools, around it or build educational materials around it, then if you are interested in archiving our history, so just collect, so we build, we did many different type of video messages that how can you archive your own family, your own history, your grandfather's documentation, your grandmother's documentation and what kind of technology can you use to do that and stuff like that or maybe your individual archive, our collective archive, so all those those kinds of things, initiative that people thought that was not necessary, all these documents. So people started to feel this is necessary and they're collecting that as well and bringing the educational tool, bringing the language tool and also what we are trying to now basically tell people or convince people that there is a way that we do not need a centralized government to accept us to build an identity and then also to access financial bank instrument, having a Visa card or a MasterCard. could be any other way, digital banking system, other decentralized solution and so on, which is really difficult for a marginalized community even to understand or comprehend. So that's what we are looking at and multiple ways of, so that they can tap into financial services. We haven't implemented any yet, but we did a pilot on building a token. So this token, just one last minute that this token was built like in 2018 and 19. What we did was we did a lot of community work and this community work was done by the people and then they get rewarded. Once they get rewarded we had some exit exit strategy. One of them was how can they redeem a health card with redeeming this token. So for one year health insurance otherwise so these insurance companies were linked with multiple hospitals. If they directly go to hospital, hospital does not accept them because they don't have an identity. So we find a way around to get to the hospital. In Malaysia we did that. And another success was there was multiple limited short kind of debit card, Visa and Master. So they used to give this to migrants. So we managed to secure a deal with them. Anybody who has the token, they can actually use this for one... year or one time so that they can have access to ATM machines which they have never been have access in their life. So that's how couple of things and it could go so we do not want to emphasize you know also going back to the centralized like Visa and Masters and getting things done but it was just a taste for people that there are ways if we explore and look for it there are ways that we could go around it and get access to this and especially new generation. who is about 50 or 60 percent of the community in Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Thailand and many part of the world who are very tax-saving. They want to build something. They want to find something. They want to look for something in that sense. So I will stop here. Thank you very much.