In our daily life, there are things we do not notice while they are still around us. A mother tongue can be one of them. We grow up hearing it at home, in conversations with family,  jokes exchanged between neighbours, or stories told before bedtime. We rarely stop to think about how many of our memories are carried by the words we inherit. However, when those words begin to disappear, we do realize that a language is never simply a collection of vocabulary, It is a way of remembering who we are.

I am a Sundanese woman, and Sundanese is part of the memory. 

For me, the question of whether the Sundanese language will continue to live is not merely a linguistic question. It is a deeply personal one. It is connected to the kind of world we will leave behind for the generations that come after us. Will they still be able to read old expressions, understand the stories told by their grandparents, recognize the names of plants and places in their own language? Or they simply have the freedom to say, “This is my language.” 

The world around us, however, is changing rapidly. Most of our everyday lives have moved onto screens. We read, learn, work, socialize, watch videos, and exchange information through digital platforms. Languages meet one another there every second. Some have enormous amounts of content behind them; others appear only occasionally, or not at all.

This is where I began to think differently about the future of Sundanese. Perhaps preserving a language today does not only mean teaching children to speak it at home. It also means making sure the language has a place where knowledge can grow.

Talking about language, a language needs books. It needs stories, dictionaries, photographs, historical records, scientific information, local knowledge, and people willing to write in it. It needs a presence in the spaces where future generations will learn and seek information. Likewise with  Sundanese language, it cannot live on only through documents it also needs a home, the digital world.

From the Old Place to the New Home

Women play a special role and have a particularly meaningful connection to the preservation of the Sundanese language. Within families, women especially mothers and grandmothers have traditionally played an important role in passing down the language and cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. A child may first encounter a Sundanese expression through a conversation with their mother, hear stories from their grandmother, enjoy traditional recipes prepared in the kitchen, or listen to songs sung at home.

However, I do not think women’s role should end there. If the spaces where knowledge is produced are changing, our participation must change with them.

Women should not only be the people who pass culture down within families. They can also become the people who document, interpret, question, and bring it into new forms. For example, a traditional story can become a digital story, a recipe can become an audio-visual record, and a forgotten word can be added to a dictionary. Moreover, a local historical site can be photographed or documented, and manuscript can be digitised. Therefore, a piece of knowledge that once existed only in someone’s memory can be placed in a space where others can find it. None of these acts may seem monumental on their own. However, culture is often preserved through small acts repeated over time. This is one reason I became interested in Wikimedia.

Why Women’s Voices Matter

There is another reason why I believe women need to be more visible in this kind of work. Knowledge is never entirely neutral. What ultimately gets documented often depends on what we pay attention to, what we consider important, and whose experiences we consider worthy of being recorded.

If women are absent from the process of documenting knowledge, some aspects of women’s lives may remain underrepresented. Consider the knowledge traditionally associated with women’s everyday lives: household practices, food preparation, childcare, textile traditions, local healing knowledge, oral histories, family stories, and countless forms of labour that rarely appear in formal historical records. These are not insignificant pieces of knowledge. They are part of culture.

When women document them, they are not simply preserving “women’s topics.” They are expanding the picture of what a community considers worth remembering. This is why digital literacy among women matters to me. It is not only about learning how to use technology. It is also about having the confidence to participate in the production of knowledge.

A woman does not have to be a historian, linguist, programmer, or academic to contribute. She can start with the things closest to her: a word her grandmother used to say, a family recipe still kept at home, a photograph of an old building in her village, or a story about the place where she grew up. Even a plant whose Sundanese name is slowly being forgotten, or a manuscript she comes across in a local collection. These can become a starting point, that may seem small and ordinary, but when they are documented and shared, they can become part of something much larger, a broader body of knowledge.

Finding Sundanese in Wikimedia

My involvement in Wikimedia projects, particularly through my work with Wikimedia Bandung, has given me a different understanding about the definition of contribution to the knowledge.

Wikimedia is often associated with Wikipedia, but the movement is much broader than an encyclopedia. Its projects create spaces where people can contribute knowledge in different forms: articles, dictionaries, quotations, historical texts, photographs, audio, video, and structured data.

For languages like Sundanese, these spaces matter. Sundanese has a long literary and cultural history. It has manuscripts, oral traditions, local histories, traditional knowledge, place names, food traditions, agricultural knowledge, and countless words and expressions that cannot be replaced by other languages. For this reason, it needs people who are willing to make that knowledge accessible to others, because a rich cultural heritage does not automatically make its way into the digital world. 

For me, there is something deeply meaningful about that idea. Knowledge does not have to belong to one person. It can be shared. Through Wikimedia Bandung, I’am lucky to be able to meet so many people, from different backgrounds: students, teachers, university lecturers, and members of the wider public. What connects as is not necessarily the same profession or academic background, but a willingness to contribute something to the commons of human knowledge. 

A Language Needs More Than Speakers

A language can remain alive and spoken at home while, at the same time, gradually becoming less visible in the wider public space. This distinction becomes increasingly important in the digital age.

Imagine a young Sundanese speaker is searching online for information about a traditional plant, a historical figure, an old manuscript, a village, or a cultural practice. If the information is available only in another language, the young person may still find an answer, but the connection between the subject and their own linguistic world becomes weaker.

Now, imagine that the same information is available in Sundanese. The difference is not merely linguistic. It says that the language is capable of carrying knowledge. It tells the speakers that their language is not only something used at home or in informal conversation. It can also be a language for history, science, education, culture, and contemporary knowledge.

That is why I see Wikimedia projects as more than digital platforms. They can become places where a language proves that it is still alive.

Wikipedia can provide encyclopedic knowledge in Sundanese. Wiktionary can help document vocabulary. Wikisource can preserve texts that have entered the public domain. Wikimedia Commons can hold photographs, recordings, videos, and other media. Wikidata can connect information in structured forms that can be understood and processed by both humans and machines.

Each project serves a different purpose. Together, they create a kind of digital ecosystem. Besides, within that ecosystem, a language such as Sundanese can find room to breathe.

Wikimedia Bandung and the Work of Continuity

This is where the work of Wikimedia Bandung becomes meaningful to me. The community organizes training sessions, educational activities, cultural documentation programs, documentation of traditional Sundanese food, and projects documenting local flora and fauna using their Sundanese names, along with various other initiatives that encourage people to contribute to Wikimedia projects. These activities create opportunities for people who may never have previously imagined themselves as “knowledge contributors” to take part.

I have seen how a workshop can turn curiosity into contribution. Someone who comes simply to learn can grow into an editor; a student can begin documenting cultural sites; a teacher can bring Wikimedia projects into the classroom. A volunteer may even discover that the language they use every day also has a place as a language of digital knowledge.

The process does not happen overnight. A language is not “saved” by one grand act, but through many small contributions: an article, a photograph, a word, a recording, a correction, or a story that is finally documented. Over time, these pieces become part of something larger.

Perhaps that is what I love most about Wikimedia. Something meaningful and far-reaching does not always come from large institutions, but from the care of ordinary people who are willing to share what they know.

Wikimedia Projects: Keeping the Light Alive

Sometimes I imagine language as a light. It does not disappear simply because one person stops using it, but a light needs someone’s willing to keep it burning.

The Sundanese language has endured because generations before us continued to use, write, sing, teach, and carry it from one generation to the next. Our responsibilities may be different, but the principle remains the same, we have new tools. We have new spaces and we live in a digital world that offers far greater possibilities for sharing knowledge than ever before.

The question is: will we use those spaces?

For me, contributing to Wikimedia is one small answer.

I do not imagine that a single article, dictionary entry, or photograph can determine the future of a language. However I believe that thousands of small contributions can change how visible a language is and perhaps, more importantly, change how the speakers see themselves.

A language which presents on the internet is a language that can be found. A language capability of carrying knowledge is a language that can continue to grow. A culture documented by the people who live within it has a greater chance of being understood from its own perspective.

That is why I hope to see more Sundanese women entering the digital world, not only as users, but also as contributors. We can start with simple things: writing about what we know, documenting what is around us, adding a word, sharing a story or photograph, or improving an article that needs correction. When we know it, why don’t we help others by doing the same?

All of these things may seem simple. Yet, perhaps cultural continuity has always been built in this way not through grand declarations, but through people who quietly decide that something they have inherited is worth carrying forward into the future.

As a Sundanese woman, I want to be one of them. I want the Sundanese language to remain present not only in the voices of our families, but also in the places where future generations go to seek knowledge. I want the language to remain visible, read, heard, and discovered not as a language trapped in the past, but as a living language moving toward the future.

In conclusion, perhaps this is how we can keep the light of Sundanese culture alive in the digital age: not simply by protecting what has been passed down to us, but by creating new spaces for it to continue shining. Wikimedia provides one such space. We can contribute Sundanese-language articles to Wikipedia, write and publish books on Wikibooks, add vocabulary to Wiktionary, help transcribe and digitize Sundanese manuscripts on Wikisource, or document Sundanese cultural heritage through Wikimedia Commons. There are many other ways to contribute. What matters most is that we do not remain mere spectators in the digital world, but take part in shaping the knowledge we will pass on to future generations.