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In a village with patchy mobile coverage, Ganesh Birua reportedly found one spot beneath a tree where his phone could connect. He used it to share words and lessons in Ho, an Adivasi language, and its Warang Citi script. His work was part of a grassroots effort involving a keyboard maker, a language-learning app developer and language-technology volunteers—an effort to make Ho easier to write, teach and encounter online.
The account was published by Scroll in February 2022, so its descriptions of apps and rollouts are historical, not a guarantee of what is available today. One technical detail has changed in how that story should be read: it said Warang Citi had been removed from Unicode in 2021, but current Unicode documentation lists the script in the active range U+118A0–U+118FF.
Ho is a language; Warang Citi is one way to write it
Ho is a North Munda language in the Austroasiatic family, spoken principally in Odisha and Jharkhand, with speakers also in West Bengal. Ho refers to a language and to the Adivasi community associated with it; Warang Citi is a script used to represent the language. Ho has also been written using Devanagari, Bengali, Odia and Latin alphabets, so digital access to Ho should not be confused with adoption of one script by every speaker.
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The 2022 Scroll feature described Ho as having a little over one million speakers. That is a figure reported at the time, not a newly verified 2026 population estimate. The feature also described Ho as vulnerable, but that label should be tied to a particular assessment and date rather than used as a general synonym for a smaller language.
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Warang Citi was devised by Lako Bodra in the mid-20th century. It is also called Varang Kshiti; “Warang Citi” is the name used in Unicode. It is written left to right and has full vowel letters rather than relying on the vowel-modifier pattern common in many Indic scripts. It includes uppercase and lowercase forms; its conventions for numbers continue to evolve, and Latin punctuation is used.
These features matter to users, but script design alone cannot make a language usable on a phone. Characters must be encoded, rendered in a font, available through an input method, and supported by content and tools that people actually use.
Ganesh Birua: putting words where people could find them
According to Scroll, Birua learned through Facebook that Ho had its own script. He began learning Warang Citi and posting letters, vocabulary and translations into Odia and English. In 2018 he expanded his activity to Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and a blog. At first, his work attracted little attention, and weak connectivity in his village made even uploading a post an exercise in finding a signal.
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That posting was more than outreach. When a language has little material published online, each item of text can become a resource for future teaching, reference and software. Subhashish Panigrahi, who worked with volunteers on foundational language technology, reportedly extracted about 5,000 words from Birua’s material and another available site. That was a project milestone, not a complete dictionary or a community-approved standardized lexicon. The feature stressed that Ho speakers themselves would need to expand and shape the collection.
The distinction is important: a word list may not include definitions, examples, grammar, dialect labels or a record of who reviewed each entry. Still, digitizing words is a necessary first step toward resources such as searchable vocabulary, learning materials and spell-checking.
Mangu Purty: from encoded characters to a keyboard
Unicode gives characters stable numeric identities so compatible systems can exchange text. It does not provide a keyboard. Mangu Purty, a Ho community member who studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University, recognized this gap: people might have a script and a font yet still lack a convenient way to type it on a phone.
The Scroll report described Purty’s attention to the practical details of a keyboard and its letterforms—proportions, dimensions and spacing—and his use of Noto Sans Warang Citi as an available font foundation. It reported that a mobile keyboard was released alongside Android 11 in September 2021, making it possible to type Warang Citi in messaging apps rather than depend on a computer.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchA current tool listing offers a useful, but limited, update. Keyman lists a Unicode-encoded Warang Citi keyboard by Mangu Purty and identifies Ho as a supported language. That listing does not establish that it is the same implementation described in the 2021 Android rollout, nor does it by itself confirm compatibility with every current device or platform. Readers should check the listing and their device’s installation requirements before relying on it.
A keyboard solves input, not every writing problem. Users still need font rendering, shared conventions, vocabulary, guidance for new terms and places to publish. A font displays characters; a keyboard enters them. Neither is a spell-checker or a teaching system.
Hercules Munda: turning text into a learning activity
Hercules Munda, described in the feature as a Ho community member studying linguistics at SOAS in London, built an online language-learning application that used Purty’s keyboard. It included games for Ho and other Munda languages. The reported audience included Adivasi young people whose parents had moved from villages to cities, and who might have fewer opportunities to learn a heritage language in everyday settings.
The point was not that phones automatically preserve a language. Rather, games and digital lessons can create another setting in which young people encounter it. The 2022 report does not provide a stable app URL, user numbers, technical details or maintenance status. Its account therefore cannot establish whether the application remains available now.
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Language tools depend on language data. A spell-checker needs a substantial, reviewed vocabulary; search works better when text is available in machine-readable form; educational applications need examples and lessons. At the time of the feature, Birua’s online writing and one other site were reportedly among the few substantial primary digital sources for Ho.
This creates a low-resource-language dilemma: developers need text and audio to make useful tools, while speakers may be less inclined to create digital material if input methods and platforms are awkward. The work described by Panigrahi and the volunteers addressed one side of that loop by helping make existing material usable as a word list. Continued growth, review and community stewardship would be needed for it to support more advanced tools.
Researcher Kalika Bali, quoted in the feature, described this broader challenge for languages with limited digital resources: whether tools can be built before enough content exists, and whether people will use those tools once they are built. The answer depends not only on engineering but also on access, trust, usefulness and participation.
Unicode is a foundation, not a digital ecosystem
Unicode’s current documentation lists Warang Citi as an encoded script and provides its characters in the range U+118A0–U+118FF. Its description notes that Ho speakers may write in multiple scripts and characterizes Ho as primarily oral with an emergent literary tradition. That description is technical context, not evidence that Ho lacks literature, formal knowledge or a history of language use.
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Even an encoded script may fail to display correctly on a device without a suitable font or shaping support. And a correctly displayed word is not necessarily searchable, spell-checked, translated or understood by speech software. The Unicode character chart and the Unicode specification’s Warang Citi section document the encoding; they do not certify that every app or phone supports it.
What “digital age” can mean in practice
Progress is easier to judge as a set of layers than as a yes-or-no claim that a language is “online”:
- Encoding: characters have standard code points, allowing interoperable text in principle.
- Rendering: fonts and software display the script legibly.
- Input: users can type it, including on phones they can afford and access.
- Exchange: messages survive copying, sharing and opening across compatible devices.
- Content: people create and publish posts, stories, lessons and reference material.
- Discovery and learning: content can be found, indexed and used in education.
- Language technology: tools such as spell-checking, OCR, speech recognition, speech synthesis and translation work reliably.
- Stewardship: communities and institutions maintain the tools, data and conventions over time.
The story of Birua, Purty, Munda and Panigrahi documents movement through foundational stages: encoding, input and the creation of online text, with experiments in learning. It does not establish broad search coverage or reliable modern language technology for Ho.
The O Foundation’s Ho resource collection is one place to find materials such as a Warang Citi chart, fonts and tutorials. Keyman’s Warang Citi keyboard listing identifies a current keyboard option. Those resources are practical leads, not proof that all devices, schools or communities have what they need.
Community decisions matter as much as software
Standardization is not merely a technical task. People may differ in spelling, dialect, preferred script and terminology. The feature noted that Purty had proposed terminology of his own, including “Achusanab,” but that it awaited wider acceptance. It should not be presented as established Ho vocabulary. Nor can the work of a few activists be treated as the view of every Ho speaker.
Language projects need to ask who approves spellings and new terms, who can use or adapt the data, how dialect variation is represented, and how recordings or texts were gathered. Consent, privacy, transparent licensing and durable maintenance affect whether a resource can be trusted and reused. Community involvement is not a decorative endorsement at the end of a project; it shapes whether the tool is useful at all.
Other practical barriers remain: limited connectivity, older devices, keyboard installation friction, font availability, uneven literacy support and a small supply of clean digital text. Building a tool for an affordable phone is not enough if it assumes dependable internet or if no local guidance explains how to use it.
Santhali offers a comparison, not a blueprint
The 2022 feature contrasted Ho’s emerging online presence with Santhali, a related Munda language with a more visible digital and publishing ecosystem, including use of Ol Chiki, online media and a Wikipedia. That comparison shows what a script can help make possible: publishing, cultural production and material that readers can discover online.
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But Ho cannot simply copy Santhali’s path. Speaker communities, institutional recognition, literacy, standardization, organizations and existing media differ. A comparison is useful for identifying possibilities, not for treating one language’s history as a template for another.
What the documented tools do—and do not—show
The evidence supports a modest but meaningful conclusion. In the early 2020s, activists created online Ho content, a mobile input option was reported, a learning application was built, and volunteers began turning sparse online material into a word list. Current Unicode documentation confirms that Warang Citi is encoded; Keyman lists a keyboard by Purty; and O Foundation collects Ho learning and script resources.
The available sources do not establish whether Birua’s channels remain active, whether the reported word list has expanded, whether Munda’s app is still online, or how broadly the keyboard is used and maintained. They also do not establish the existence of dependable Ho search, spell-checking, OCR, speech or translation tools. That uncertainty is a reason to avoid overstating progress—not to dismiss the work already done.
Digital inclusion for Ho is not achieved simply because a script appears in a standard or on a keyboard. It means speakers can write and exchange messages, find material, learn, publish and pass on language in forms that suit their lives. The contributions described here address essential early layers of that goal; the larger task is to make those layers useful, connected and community-governed in everyday life.
Sources: Scroll’s February 2022 feature; Unicode Warang Citi chart; Unicode 17.0; Keyman keyboard listing; O Foundation Ho resources.
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