Nirasha Piyawadani, GPJ Sri Lanka
M. A. Sisilin’s daughter gave her a smartphone. She says she’s still learning the features, but she primarily uses it to text in Sinhala via the Helakuru app.
KALUTARA, SRI LANKA ̶ M. A. Sisilin’s daughter works in Colombo, the commercial capital of Sri Lanka, about 43 kilometers (26.7 miles) from her hometown. She lives alone there in a rented room.
Sisilin, 75, worried about her. Other parents texted their adult children to keep in touch, but Sisilin, who only speaks Sinhala, could not because her phone did not support Sinhala characters.
But in early 2014, she downloaded Helakuru, a free mobile app that enabled her phone with a Sinhala keyboard. Now, using that keyboard, she can text using the Sinhala alphabet. When her daughter responds in Sinhala, those messages pop up in the correct characters, as well.
“My daughter sends SMS to me with her information and problems,” Sisilin says. “I did not understand sending SMS in the past. But now I can read and understand them in Sinhala very easily.”
Sisilin is among more than 950,000 individual users who have downloaded the Helakuru app, as the app is commonly known, as of mid-January. The app also has some paid extra features.
More than 438,000 phones use it actively on a daily basis, according to a Google Play Developer Console analytics update provided to Global Press Journal by Dhanika Perera, who founded the software development company Bhasha Lanka (Pvt.) Ltd. and developed the app with his team.
Sinhala is one of two official languages in Sri Lanka, and the mother tongue of the Sinhalese people in Sri Lanka, but the language wasn’t available on SMS until 2012, when Perera developed the Helakuru app. Other Sinhala keyboard apps were available, but they were often incomplete or did not work across platforms.
In Sri Lanka, there are more mobile phone subscriptions than people. The Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka, the state regulatory body for all telecommunications operations, reported in December 2014 that there are 107 mobile subscriptions for every 100 people. Many people have multiple SIM cards to take advantage of benefits offered by different mobile companies.
In total, there are 22.1 million active mobile phone subscribers, according to that report. The country’s population, according to 2014 World Bank estimates, is about 20.6 million people. About 80 percent of the population is fluent in Sinhala, while 31 percent has English literacy, according to Sri Lanka Census of Population and Housing data published in 2012.
A Unicode font for Sinhala was approved in 1998, says Ruvan Weerasinghe, chief of the Language Technology Research Laboratory of the University of Colombo School of Computing. That was the start of Sinhala communications in computers, and it was continuously developed and gradually adapted to mobile phones.
But typing in Sinhala on mobile phones was not easy to do, Weerasinghe says.
“The Nokia phone operating system allowed the use of Sinhala Unicode font, but messages sent in Unicode Sinhala font could only be read by another Nokia phone,” he says. “If the message was received in a phone with a different operating system, all they saw was boxes and symbols.”
Even now, not all phones can install the Sinhala Unicode font, Weerasinghe says.
Perera’s app makes it possible for any mobile phone user to both write and read Sinhala text. It also eliminates the need for “Singlish,” the informal written language that combines English and Sinhala, which Perera says was often used in text message. (“Singlish” also refers to an English-based linguistic amalgam spoken in Singapore, which is unrelated to the “Singlish” used in Sri Lanka.)
“The text used by various persons to create Sinhala words is different,” Perera, 28, says, referring to English letters used to spell Sinhala words. “The message is not correctly communicated due to this problem.”
The app helps preserve the Sinhala language, says J. B. Disanayaka, an emeritus professor at the University of Colombo and an expert on the Sinhala language.
“Sinhala language has unique pronunciations,” he says. “Using English text to represent them gives a comical effect to our language.”
Mobile phone apps, such as Helakuru, and similar computer software help users avoid communication problems that occur with Singlish transliteration, Disanayaka says.
“Sinhala is a scientific language,” he says. “It is important to take it forward.”
Helakuru is not Perera’s first invention. In 2011, as a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Moratuwa, Perera invented the SETT Browser, a mobile browser that allows the user to view websites in Sinhala or any online information written with the Sinhala font, whether it is in Unicode or a different Sinhala font. Previously, when viewing Sinhala-language websites on most mobile phones, the text was seen as jumbled characters. The browser has since been adapted to Tamil, the other national language of Sri Lanka.
Perera first dabbled in technology in 2000, when at age 13 he borrowed a neighbor’s computer. He says his parents, noting his interest, bought him his own computer a year later. Initially, he says he struggled to use computers because he wasn’t fluent in English. He studied the language to fix that problem, but noticed that his school friends avoided computers for the same reason. He saw the same issue as an information technology student at the University of Moratuwa.
Lack of English fluency had an isolating effect on those students, Perera says.
“International news and modern information communication technology reached them very slowly,” Perera says. “It prevented them from arming themselves with modern technology and moving with the developing world.”
Perera says he was inspired to help Sinhala speakers embrace new technology using their own language.
Now, businesses use the app, too.
Chandu Mandara De Silva, 25, is a client service executive in an advertising company based in Colombo. He prefers to communicate with his team via SMS, but that was difficult before they began using the Helakuru app. Singlish texts led to errors, he says.
In May 2015, a friend introduced De Silva to the Helakuru app. Now, those businesses texts are sent in Sinhala.
“It helped me to discuss the edits in a copy clearly and accurately,” he says.
Perera is now busy with other projects. Since officially setting up his software development company, Bhasha Lanka, in 2013, Perera and his team of 12 developers have launched ten products to the Sri Lankan market, in addition to the SETT Browser and Helakuru. They also create apps and software for other companies.
Perera is particularly proud of the Puvath Reader app, which allows news alerts to be sent to mobile phones in Sinhala text.
“A farmer in a remote village can now get information like the market price of their crops without coming to Colombo,” Perera says. “This app was developed to serve a section of people like this.”
In January, the company launched a mobile app for Sri Lanka’s parliament. That app is available in Sinhala, Tamil and English.
Perera and Bhasha Lanka have won several national and regional awards. The Helakuru app has won four awards to date, including the m-Inclusion award in 2014, part of the mBillionth Award South Asia.
Perera was recognized as the Most Innovative ICT Entrepreneur of the Year at the annual National Best Quality ICT Awards in October 2015 in Colombo.
The latest project from Perera and his team is a Sinhala-language social networking site. Yalu, the transliteration of the word “friend” in Sinhala, was launched at the INFOTEL 2015 exhibition in Colombo in November 2015 and is still in its beta version.
Ajith Perakum Jayasinghe translated this article from Sinhala.
