About Us

Language is an indispensable element of culture, culture enables diversity, diversity contributes to human resilience, and human resilience ensures human continuity. Therefore, langauges must be preserved and improved. And there is no better way to preserve a language than to ensure that a generation speaks it fluently and proficiently and passes it on to another.

Lotha is a non profit venture with the goal to create a product ecosystem that will assist users in increasing the use of a particular language, especially their mother tongue, and improve its fluency and proficiency.

The motivation for this project is the evident decrease in the use of mother tongues among people, and the slow erosion of fluency and proficiency in it, especially in aspects such as exclamations, catch phrases, personal conversations, casual talks, formal conversations, professional communication, chatting, messaging, emailing, typing, etc. This trend will gradually result in what is known as language attrition in a person, and when this happens in multiple people, the death of a language is near.

There are various reasons for the declining fluency and proficiency of indigenous languages; most of them systemic reasons. Lotha cannot influence systemic reasons as they are not in our hands. But if any person, institution, organisation or group decides to give more importance to indigenous languages and integrate them in their day to day operations, the goal of this project is to create tools and resources for them. Our product roadmap can be found here.

Note that because of the non profit nature of Lotha, and because the contributions here are made by people in their free time with no remunerations, our product development is slow.

Lotha was launched on April 24, 2024. Our name is inspired by the endangered Lotha language, spoken by the Lotha tribe of Nagaland. However, we do not represent or have any association with the Lotha tribe or the Lotha language. Only the name is inspired from them, and is pronounced as Lōtha (लॊथ).

We are not associated with any political parties or political organisations. Opinions discussed in our publications may draw parallels with the opinions of both political sides. This is purely co-incidental.

For a project that speaks so much about language culture, it is ironical to have an English website. This irony is because our target audience for whom we are building resources have an upper hand in English. Secondly, we aim to include non-Bhāratīya languages in due time. For these reasons, an English website as a default website is a necessity. Multi-lingual versions are in the pipeline too.

Hoping to our products improve your language skills,

Sincerely,
Justin Mathew
Founder