Editor's note: From April 26 to May 2, 2022, Satdeep Gill will be hosting the @AsiaLangsOnline rotating Twitter account, which explores how technology can be used to revitalize Asian languages. Read more about the campaign here. Satdeep Gill is a free knowledge enthusiast based out of Patiala, in the northwestern state of Punjab in India. Since 2011 he has been helping to develop and grow the Punjabi Wikipedia space online; he also spearheaded the launch of the Global Voices Punjabi lingua project in 2017. Gill joined the Wikimedia Foundation in 2017 to support community conversations related to the Wikimedia Movement’s Strategy 2030. Since November 2018, he has been a program officer in the GLAM & Culture team (GLAM = Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) at the Wikimedia Foundation and has been supporting projects related to digitization, language documentation, and language revitalization. One of the recent projects Gill supported was a capacity building workshop in partnership with UNESCO and Bophana Center in Cambodia. It focused on training indigenous youth to help them document their languages and cultures. He also supported the creation of Balinese Wikisource which enables the Balinese community to transcribe their literary heritage, handwritten palm-leaf manuscripts, on the internet. Gill also contributes to Wikimedia Commons by photographing the birds of Punjab and surrounding states. Bluethroat near Jalalpur, Patiala. Image via Wikipedia by Satdeep Gill. CC BY-SA 4.0. Rising Voices interviewed Satdeep Gill over email. The interview has been edited for clarity. Rising Voices (RV): Please tell us about yourself and your language skills. Satdeep Gill (SG): I have always lived in the city of Patiala. I studied maths and science in high school but shifted my focus to Punjabi language and literature from my undergraduate degree. I love learning languages. Besides my native Punjabi (both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), I am fluent in English, Hindi, and Urdu. I have dabbled with Spanish and French for many years and I know I can thrive in Spanish or French-speaking countries. These days I am thoroughly enjoying learning Farsi online from the Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Iran. RV: Tell us about your involvement in Punjabi Wikipedia and your accolades. SG: It is important to note that the Punjabi language is written in two scripts, Gurmukhi, written left to right and mainly used in India, and Shahmukhi, written right to left and used in Pakistan. While the spoken language is quite similar, there are vast differences in writing, which led to the creation of two different Wikipedias for the language. Punjabi Wikipedia (for Gurmukhi script) and Western Punjabi Wikipedia (for Shahmukhi script). When I discovered Punjabi Wikipedia in in the early 2010s, it had a really small number of articles, most of them one-liners. My father joined me and we started building Punjabi Wikipedia together. In 2011, I started my undergraduate degree at Punjabi University, Patiala, and started involving my peers in contributing to the Punjabi version of Wikipedia. Our efforts helped create a vibrant community of Punjabi Wikipedians meeting regularly and engaging in various national and international activities. In 2015, I was the first Punjabi Wikipedian to be invited to Wikimania (the largest event dedicated to Wikipedia and its sister projects) in Mexico. There I received an honourable mention from Jimmy Wales for our efforts to make Punjabi Wikipedia one of the fastest-growing Indic Wikipedias. RV: What is the current state of the Punjabi language both online and offline? SG: Punjabi is the official language of the Punjab state in India and Punjabi music is pretty famous around the globe. Despite its official status and status in popular culture, most of the private schools in the state don’t encourage speaking in Punjabi — in fact, students are punished for speaking in their mother tongue. I was also educated in a school where speaking in English was enforced and, if we wanted to switch to another language, we were advised to use Hindi instead of Punjabi. Punjabi doesn’t enjoy any patronage at all in Pakistan, where Punjabis form the largest ethnic group with around 40 percent of the population. The national language of Pakistan is Urdu, and Punjabi is not even taught at the school level. On the other hand, increased migration from the region in the last century, especially in the last few decades, means Punjabis form sizeable communities in the UK, Canada, USA, and Australia, among others. Data from the 2011 census released by the Office of National Statistics in the UK reported Punjabi as the third most spoken language in the UK, and it is taught at the GCSE and A levels in the country.