Daanisy is Kaidipang-Bolangitang, living in Jakarta. He became interested with his heritage language in middle school and has been actively learning it since. Since 2018, Daanisy has been compiling a Kaidipang-Bolangitang lexicon by working with elder speakers. As the speakers are primarily an aging population, he is trying to document everything about the language from the elders. He also works with other Kaidipang-Bolangitang language and culture activists, both young and old, to keep both the language and the culture alive.
Kaidipang-Bolangitang is an Austronesian language spoken by the Kaidipang ethnic group in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. An endangered language, it is spoken by around 25,000 people. The language is taught in some elementary schools, though there are no textbooks, learning dictionaries, or other teaching materials available to support learners.
Daanisy is a member of the Kaidipang-Bolangitang diaspora living in Jakarta. As a heritage speaker of Kaidipang-Bolangitang, he’s been working with elder speakers to compile a Kaidipang-Bolangitang lexicon. For this project, he will create a bilingual Kaidipang-Indonesian dictionary and launch a Wikipedia edition of his language within the incubator hub.
Wikitongues Fellows are bold, community-rooted leaders driving the future of their languages. Through a year-long accelerator, they receive funding, hands-on technical training, and strategic mentorship to launch and scale projects in documentation, education, lexicography, media, and Wikimedia platforms. Each Fellow joins a global cohort of language activists who share tools, experiments, and hard-won lessons, transforming local initiatives into sustainable movements. The result is practical, community-owned work that keeps languages spoken, taught, recorded, and alive for generations.
