Assamese at My Fingertips

Assamese at My Fingertips

Rain lashed against my apartment window in Dublin, the Irish gloom amplifying the ache in my chest. Back home in Assam, my grandmother's 80th birthday dawned, and my clumsy transliteration attempts felt like betrayal. I'd spent 45 minutes butchering "জন্মদিনৰ শুভেচ্ছা" (happy birthday) into disjointed Latin characters using some clunky converter app – "jonmodinor shubhechcha" looked alien even to me. When she replied with a voice note, her cheerful "ধন্যবাদ, পোঁ!" (thank you, son!) couldn't mask the pause before she asked why I'd stopped writing in our script.

That night, I stumbled upon it – a keyboard promising native Assamese input. Skepticism warred with desperation as I downloaded it. The permissions demanded full network access, triggering my inner conspiracy theorist. "What's harvesting my keystrokes now?" I muttered, thumb hovering over cancel until memories of grandmother's handwritten letters swayed me.

Setup felt like defusing a bomb – cryptic menus, unexplained toggles. But when that familiar অ-ঔ layout finally shimmered on-screen, something primal stirred. I tentatively pressed জ (ja), then ে (e), forming জে (je). No lag, no intermediate English buffer. My thumb flew: ঠ (tho) + ু (u) = ঠু (thu). "জেঠু!" (Grandma!). It appeared instantly, perfectly formed. When I typed আপুনি (you), the prediction engine – likely neural networks trained on regional dialects – anticipated থাকিব (are) before I finished. I sent a full sentence: "আপুনি কেনে থাকিব?" Tears blurred the screen as she replied within minutes: "অতি ভাল, মোৰ পোঁ।" (Very well, my son). The warmth in those curving glyphs melted Dublin's chill.

Euphoria carried me into our family group chat. Instead of the usual English-hinged chaos, I unleashed pure Assamese: "এই কিব’ৰ্ডটোৱে আমাৰ ভাষা ঘূৰাই আনিছে!" (This keyboard brought our language back!). Pandemonium erupted. My engineer cousin in Toronto demanded download links; my aunt in Silchar sent voice notes weeping. For three hours, our screens overflowed with long-lost script – recipes, folk tales, inside jokes resurrected in elegant loops and dots. That digital homecoming tasted sweeter than any পিঠা (rice cake).

Reality bit back hard at Wednesday's market. Sunlight glared off my screen, rendering the gorgeous মেখেলা (traditional pattern) theme into psychedelic sludge. I fumbled, accidentally sending "মোক মাছ বিচৰা লাগিছে" (I need fish) as "মোক মাছ বিচৰা লাগিছিল" (I needed fish) – past tense confusing the fishmonger. The swipe-to-type feature, while fluid for common verbs, choked on compound words like হাঁহ-কণী (duck eggs), suggesting হাঁহ (duck) + কণী (egg) separately. Manual correction under time pressure felt like linguistic treason.

Then came the diacritic disaster. Attempting to write গোসাঁই (Lord), the keyboard ignored my া (aa) matra, outputting গসাঁই – blasphemous gibberish. My furious jabbing summoned three emoji suggestions instead. Later, digging into settings revealed a "diacritic sensitivity" slider buried under four submenus – defaulted to "forgiving." Forgiving? My ancestors would've disowned me! And that network permission still itched. Discovering it enabled cloud-based dictionary updates explained nothing about data encryption. Trust evaporated faster than Assam's morning fog.

Yet tonight, as I type জোনাকী (moonlight) watching Dublin's pale moon, the keyboard anticipates পৰী (fairy) – our childhood bedtime story phrase. Grandmother's voice echoes: "জোনাকী পৰী আহিছে নিদ্ৰালু হ’বলৈ..." (Moonlight fairies come to make you sleepy...). The prediction nails it. This flawed marvel isn't just an app; it's a lifeline to identity in a diaspora's cold isolation. When grandmother messages "আকৌ লিখিবা, মোৰ টেঙেনা" (Write again, my sour-tongued one – her old nickname for me), I’ll endure a thousand diacritic fails. Because beneath the bugs lies rebellion: our language lives, defiant, on this tiny glass rectangle.

Keywords:Assamese Keyboard,news,diaspora identity,language preservation,transliteration tech