the literary heritage of Romi Konkani since the year 1556. However, after Konkani in the Devanagari script was made the official language of Goa in 1987, the Sahitya Akademi has supported only writers in the Devanagari script. For a very long time there has been a rising demand for official recognition of Romi Konkani by Catholics in Goa because a sizeable population of the people in Goa use the Roman script. Also a lot of the content on the Internet and the staging of the famed Tiatr is written in Romi Konkani. In January 2013, the Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court issued a notice to the state government on a Public Interest Litigation filed by the Romi Lipi Action Front seeking to amend the Official Language Act to grant official language status to Romi Konkani but has not yet been granted. Alphabet/vaṇamāḷha The vowels, consonants, and their arrangement are as follows: Dialects Konkani, despite having a small population, shows a very high number of dialects. The dialect tree structure of Konkani can easily be classified according to the region, religion, caste, and local tongue influence. Based on the historical events and cultural ties of the speakers, N. G. Kalelkar has broadly classified the dialects into three main groups: Northern Konkani: Dialects spoken in the Sindhudurga district of Maharashtra with strong cultural ties to Marathi; i.e. Malvani Central Konkani: Dialects in Goa and Northern Karnataka, where Konkani came in close contact with Portuguese language and culture and Kannada. Southern Konkani: Dialects spoken in the South Canara region (Mangalore, Udupi) of Karnataka and Kasaragod of Kerala, which came in close contact with Tulu and Kannada. Southern Konkani is very similar to Marathi, with few loanwords from Tulu and Kannada, and slight differences in pronunciation. Goan KonkaniGoan Konkani''' refers to all the central dialects of the Konkani macrolanguage except for those that fall under Maharashtrian Konkani and Canarese Konkani. These dialects are collectively assigned the language code under the ISO 639-3 classification (since it is sometimes called Goan Marathi). In common usage, Goan Konkani refers collectively only to those dialects of Konkani spoken primarily in the state of Goa, e.g. the Antruz, Bardeskari and Saxtti dialects. But in the broader linguistic context, Goanese Konkani also includes dialects spoken outside the official boundaries of Goa, such as Malvani Konkani, Chitpavani Konkani, and Karwari Konkani. Organisations There are organisations working for Konkani but,