About this project
A community-built dictionary for the Ratnagiri dialect of Kokani.
Amina Bhatkar
Software Engineer · Uran, Maharashtra
Despite being Kokanis, the youth is unable to learn the Kokani and our beautiful language is slowly dying. I realised that there is no clean digital record of the dialect. So we built one, starting from scratch, one word at a time.
Advisors & contributors
Founder of Kokani Batoo Cha Parivar, a community dedicated to preserving and promoting the Kokani language. Dr. Subedar's decades of work in documenting Ratnagiri Kokani laid the foundation this project builds upon.
Linguist and Kokani language scholar guiding the data architecture and lexical accuracy of this project. Dr. Vanoo brings expertise in Indic languages and dialect documentation to ensure the dataset meets academic rigour.
A working journalist writing in Marathi for रायगडचा आवाज, reporting from the Konkan. He brings an editor's eye to the dictionary — reviewing submissions and helping verify entries before they are published.
Living in the United States, far from the Konkan coast, Shameem carries her Kokani heritage with pride. She moderates community submissions and keeps the diaspora connected to the project — a reminder that a language lives wherever its speakers do.
Why this dictionary exists
Kokani (also romanised as Konkani) spoken in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra is a living dialect with no clean machine-readable dataset. This project starts from scratch — manually collected seed words, verified by native speakers, with the goal of building a real data platform beneath the dictionary.
The seed dataset covers questions, pronouns, family relationships, food and household items, common verbs, adjectives, time expressions, and days of the week. Audio recordings and IPA transcriptions will be added in Phase 2.
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