The manifesto
Languages do not die of old age.
They die of silence — one unrecorded elder and one skipped generation at a time.
Kodava Takk is a Dravidian language spoken in Kodagu. It has no native script in daily use; it is written, when written at all, in Kannada script. It lives primarily in the voice — in conversation, in the Palame folk songs, in ritual speech at weddings and festivals. UNESCO classifies it as definitely endangered. The 2011 census counted about 114,000 mother-tongue speakers. Families urbanize, schooling happens in Kannada and English, and every year fewer children answer their grandmothers in Thakk.
Kodava Thakk — this project — is a decision to preserve the language the way it actually exists: as sound. We do not treat the absence of a script as a weakness. We make audio the primary artifact and build everything else on top of it.
The recording is the text
For an oral language, every hour of well-recorded, well-described speech is the fundamental unit of preservation. Transcription in Kannada script is a layer we add on top. A standardized romanization is another layer. Any future script — and our community has attempted at least seven since 1889 — can be layered on later. The urgent work, the work that cannot wait, is capture: the eldest fluent voices, the Palame singers, the ritual specialists, recorded in depth, while they are with us.
We are not the first — and that is our advantage
The Māori of New Zealand proved a small community can build better language AI for itself than any tech giant will. Te Hiku Media digitized decades of native-speaker radio, ran community recording campaigns, and trained speech recognition that outperformed what big tech offered — releasing everything under a guardianship licence: the data serves the Māori people, and it is never sold.
Mozilla Common Voice turned contribution into a simple public ritual — read a sentence, validate a clip — across 100+ languages. In India, AI4Bharat at IIT Madras and Project Vaani at IISc have built the open models, the district playbooks, and the recording methodology; Karya showed that data work can be dignified, paid work for our own people. We stand on all of it. Nothing here needs to be invented — it needs to be done, by us, for us.
Our principles
- Audio first, script neutral. Record now; transcribe in Kannada script by convention; keep the script debate decoupled from the work of capture.
- The community owns the data. A Kodava data guardianship licence and a community trust decide who may use the corpus and for what. Contributors keep moral ownership. The corpus is never sold. Commercial use requires council approval and benefit-sharing.
- Elders are the priority queue. The oldest fluent speakers, the Palame singers, and ritual specialists are recorded first, in depth, on video where possible.
- Contribution is effortless and visible. Thirty-second phone clips. A public dial that moves with every voice. Festivals, the Padayatra, and school competitions as recording drives.
- Pay for the hard parts. Volunteers for breadth; paid, Karya-style work for transcription, validation, and elder sessions. Payment buys the consistency volunteerism cannot sustain.
- Ride transfer learning. Never train from scratch. Kannada, Tulu, and Malayalam are our language's neighbours; fine-tuned open models mean fifty hours of Thakk goes a very long way.
- Preservation must loop back to transmission. Every model ships inside something that helps someone speak Thakk today. Archives alone do not revive languages — speakers do.
What we will build
Four layers, each useful on its own, each feeding the next: a governance and data-trust layer that keeps the corpus owned by the community; a corpus engine that captures elder speech, folk literature, and everyday conversation at scale — 1,000 hours in 36 months; a model layer that fine-tunes speech recognition, speech synthesis, and translation on that corpus; and a product layer that puts the language in people's pockets — a public listening archive, a talking dictionary, classroom packs, and Ainmane, an AI conversation partner that recreates the thing an endangered language loses first: someone patient to talk to.
What remains is the decision to start recording
Kodava Takk still has everything it needs to thrive: fluent elders, a proud and organized community at home and abroad, strong cultural institutions — and, for the first time in history, AI that can learn a language from a few hundred hours of loving recordings.
Our voices, our data, our language. Kodava Thakk is that decision, made systematically.