VII. LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT:

A. State and Societal:

1. Language Planning:

Government of Karnataka is totally committed to the use of Kannada in the State. While Kannada is in use in all the Government offices there is a need to promote Kannada in Computers.
a) The Government of Karnataka with the co-operation of Kannada Ganaka Parishat has already evolved a common Kannada keyboard. A Government order has been issued on 1-11-2000, prescribing the standards and uniform Glyphs and the corresponding Glyph codes for Kannada script. Certain minimum features have also been prescribed in order to ensure portability of data across the software developed by different vendors.

b) Bench Mark software has also been developed through the Kannada Ganaka Parishat that can be used for day-to-day word processing activity in Kannada. This will be improvised into a full-fledged product and supplied to all the Departments. The software development for the following items of work is also undertaken through the Kannada Ganaka Parishat in phases:-

 
i. Sorting and Indexing
ii. Word Check and Find-Replace
iii. Additional fonts
iv. Unicode and Linux versions of Benchmark software
v. Grammar Check.
vi. Conversion Utility software.
vii. Star Office
viii. Logo
ix. Package for database of addresses
x. Tutor (to learn alphabets, tables etc.) 
xi. Library Management

c) The Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India is also keen on promoting the use of Indian languages on computers. They are interacting with UNICODE consortium, which is engaged in prescribing standard codes for all the languages in the world. Government of Karnataka has provided necessary inputs for Kannada script.

1. Process in Planning:

a) Standardization:

Kannada is the language of Karnataka. Like many other South-Asian languages, Kannada exhibits the phenomenon of diglossia whereby the spoken language differs to a greater or lesser extent from the spoken version of the literary language. In contrast with literary language, the spoken language is used for informal purposes such as in the home, on the street and increasingly in the dialogue portions of novels and short-stories, in plays and in movies. Most literary activities are carried on in a fairly standard form of the literary dialect.

The speech of educated people of the Bangalore-Mysore area of Karnataka is accepted by most as ‘standard’. This is the dialect used in films and on the radio to a certain extent and the one which educated speakers from other region emulate when they want to communicate with people from different areas.