Meghalaya: Google Translate Adds Khasi as One of 110 New Languages

SHILLONG: Google is expanding its Translate service by adding 110 new languages, including Cantonese, several African languages, and Khasi from Meghalaya.

This update will help improve communication for more than 614 million people, which is about 8% of the world's population.

In a statement, Google mentioned that some of the new languages are major world languages spoken by over 100 million people, while others are used by small Indigenous communities.

They also noted that a few of these languages have almost no native speakers but are the focus of active revitalization efforts.

Adding the Khasi language, which is spoken by around 900,000 people according to Britannica, is expected to greatly help both national and international tourists visiting Meghalaya.

Even though English is widely spoken in Meghalaya, adding the Khasi language to Google Translate will make communication easier and improve the tourism experience. This could also help boost the local economy.

This is Google Translate's biggest update so far. It follows the addition of 24 languages in 2022 using Zero-Shot Machine Translation and the start of the 1000 Languages Initiative.

Khasi (Ka Ktien Khasi) is an Austroasiatic language spoken by just over a million people in northeast India, mainly by the Khasi people in Meghalaya.

It has official status in some districts of this state. The closest related languages are in the Khasic group of the Shillong Plateau, including Pnar, Lyngngam, and War.

Khasi is written using the Latin alphabet. In the early 19th century, attempts to write Khasi in the Bengali-Assamese script were largely unsuccessful.

As of 2011, Khasi is spoken by 1,038,000 people in India. It is the first language for one-third of Meghalaya's population, or 997,000 people, mainly in the Khasi Hills and Jaintia Hills regions.

There are also small Khasi-speaking communities in nearby states, with the largest group of 34,600 people in Assam. Additionally, a very small number of Khasi speakers live in Bangladesh.

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