NewzVille Desk
The Ministry of Tribal Affairs will organise a three-day National Conclave on Tribal Languages & Museums from 24–26 August 2026 in Mysuru, Karnataka. The Conclave will focus on a national dialogue on the documentation, preservation and revitalization of tribal languages, together with a parallel track on strengthening Tribal Museums and Tribal Freedom Fighter Museums (TFFMs) across the country.
India’s tribal communities are custodians of several hundred languages and dialects, a large number of which remain unwritten, are absent from the classroom, and are no longer being passed down to the next generation.
Recognising that the loss of a tribal language takes with it an entire body of ecological, medicinal, agricultural and cultural knowledge, the Ministry — through the network of Tribal Research Institutes (TRIs) and State Tribal Welfare Departments — has convened the National Conclave to place community priorities at the centre of the agenda and arrive at a national roadmap for tribal language documentation, preservation and revitalization.
The conclave will be inaugurated by Durgadas Uikey,Union Minister of State, Ministry of Tribal Affairs in the presence of Raghumurthy, Minister, Tribal Welfare Department, Karnataka; Shri Anant Prakash Pandey.
The inaugural session will see the release of Karnataka Primers in tribal languages, the signing of an MoU between the Ministry of Tribal Affairs and CIIL, the launch of Chatbot, and a major update to the Adi Vaani platform — including its new iOS application, and the addition of five new languages and multiple new features on the platform.
The day’s proceedings will include panel discussions on the current status of tribal-language documentation and community-led revitalization models; on language technology — including ASR, text-to-speech, machine translation, corpus building and associated data-protection and commercialization concerns; and on multilingual education (MLE). TRIs from across the country will present their language-preservation initiatives.
Day Two will witness a panel on what tribal communities themselves want from language revitalization efforts, featuring grassroots and community-linguist speakers, followed by the drafting, adoption and signing of a possible Declaration on Tribal Languages.
