Muhammad Faisal Ansari

Revitalizing the Banjar language in Banjarmasin, Indonesia.

Lexicography, Wikimedia

2023 cohortbjn

Banjar

The Banjar language is spoken by the Banjar indigenous ethnic group native to the southeastern Kalimantan regions of indonesia. Banjar is a member of the Austronasian language group and is spoken by approximately one to five million people. Although there are many fluent native Indonesian Banjarese speakers, there are not many members of the Banjarse diaspora abroad that speak the language fluently.

Muhammed is a heritage speaker of Banjarese and an experienced contributor to multiple Wikimedia projects designed to revitalize their language. Muhammed plans to continue using Wikimedia resources with the goal of recording 3000 lexemes or root-words into Wikidata and the correct pronunciations into Wikimedia commons. Muhammed hopes that their efforts will make learning and researching Banjarese more accessible and facilitate future revitalization efforts such as the creation of a dictionary. Muhammed additionally intends to create Youtube videos catered for non-fluent Banjarese speakers to learn introductions, daily vocabulary, and conversational skills. Muhammed hopes that their efforts will pave the way for all of the Banjarese dialects to be fully recorded online.

Muhammad's background

Faisal is a native speaker of the Banjarese language. He obtained his Bachelor of Education in 2021, and he is continuing his studies with a teaching professional program at the university. In 2019, he started to contribute to Wikipedia Banjar after he joined a training session oh how to edit Wikipedia in Banjarmasin, hosted by Wikimedia Indonesia. During the workshop, he realized that Wikipedia could be a place to revitalize his language by translating articles to Wikipedia Banjar. Since then, he has worked with several Wikimedia projects such as WikiBaiman (developing 100 most visited articles in Wikipedia Banjar), WikiLeban (entering 400 Banjar lexemes to the Incubator Wiktionary Banjar), and WikiPandir (entering 500 voice recordings of Banjar lexemes to the Wikimedia Commons using Lingua Libre).

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