Initiative B at bel and Script Encoding Initiative Supporting Linguistic Diversity in Cyberspace (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Initiative B at bel and Script Encoding Initiative Supporting Linguistic
Diversity in Cyberspace

12-11-2004 (UNESCO)
http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=17488&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Efforts continue to add N'ko, a script used by the Manden people of West
Africa, to the international character encoding standards Unicode and
ISO/IEC 10646 through a project of the University of California
Berkeley's Script Encoding Initiative that is supported by UNESCO's
Initiative B at bel.

Once included in the standard and after a standardized font is
developed, users will be able to use N'ko in email, on webpages, in
blogs, or on other electronic documents. Currently, electronic text
communication in the N'ko script is very difficult, impeding
publication of newspapers, magazines, school texts and other books. For
a population of 20 million, this presents a significant barrier to
literacy efforts.

With the assistance of UNESCO's Initiative B at bel, a Unicode script
proposal for N'ko was written by Irish script-expert Michael Everson,
and has been approved for balloting by the relevant International
Organization for Standardization working group. N'ko is on the path for
inclusion in the next full release of Unicode (5.0). As part of stage
two of the project, a font will be created and locale information
identified.

This project advances efforts to build knowledge societies by promoting
linguistic diversity and survival of the world's languages in the
digital world. It will provide a means for minority groups to preserve
their cultural and literary heritage and promote literacy in their
language. In partnership with UNESCO's Initiative B at bel, the Script
Encoding Initiative will be able to continue in its quest to encode the
scripts of the world still missing from the Unicode Standard.

The N'Ko alphabet was invented by Soulemayne Kante of Kankan, Guinea, in
1949. It is mainly used by speakers of Malinke, Bambara, Dyula and
their dialects, especially in Guinea, Mali and Ivory Coast. It was
designed to accurately transcribe African tonal languages with special
attention to tones that cannot be transcribed with the Latin alphabet.



Link(s)
University of California at Berkeley Department of Linguistics Script
Encoding Initiative
UNESCO and Multilingualism
UNESCO’s Imitative B at bel

Contact
Paul Hector, UNESCO, Information Society Division

Source
UNESCO

This item can be found in the following topics:
      · Africa
      · Multilingualism in Cyberspace