I focus on one particular language, that of the Newar people, which has a mature written tradition spanning more than one thousand years, with several different styles of writing, and which, as yet, has no encoding of its writing within Unicode. Nepali is relatively easy, since it is written in Devanagari which is also used for Hindi and other Indian languages, though with some local differences. Nepal has over 120 languages, with only the national language Nepali having any modern computer support. The problem of achieving this for small languages is illustrated with the case study of Nepal. If knowledge is to be shared on the Internet between members of a linguistic community, then their language needs to be written and the writing encoded for the computer.

Home > Issue24 > Hall article Computerised writing for small languages Pat Hall, Language Technology Kendra, Patan, Nepal ABSTRACT