Africa must put its own languages on the internet

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

Africa must put its own languages on the internet
July 14, 2005, 18:45

By Rebecca Wanjiku

Norbert Klein, an adviser to the director of the Open Forum of Cambodia
says Africans who wish to see their own languages on the internet have to
make a concerted effort to develop the necessary applications. Speaking at
the ICANN conference held in Luxembourg, Klein called on African not to
wait for donor support to finance the use of local languages through the
use of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs). He says it is possible for
Africa to develop language scripts without depending on donor support
especially in areas that use existing language scripts such as Arabic.

Internationalized Domain Names seek to recognise the distinct African
languages and characters without necessarily encoding them into English.
This means that it will be possible to use IDNs in African languages with
characters other than those of the English alphabet. "Development of a
script is a long process that goes step by step. First local communities
must identify the common words to be used. Some people use different words
to mean the same thing. It must be agreed through analysis, what words cut
across the board. That may or may not need donor support," Klein added.

IDN in Africa is still in the nascent stage. Experts are studying how to
go about the multiple languages in the region, whether to start with the
easily available script or the widest spoken albeit with a different
script. According to Michael Everson, a consultant typographer, work has
already started for the design of alphabets used in various languages. He
is currently working on design of N'KO script mainly used by Mande
speakers in Mali and Guinea. In this respect, Klein feels the Cambodian
experience will be of immense importance to Africa since the process has
been locally driven by students and experts who drew up comparative tables
of the widely used words and developed a common table that was acceptable
across the board.

Cambodia had more than its fair share of confusion when people based in
the US, Canada, and Australia among other countries compiled twenty
different language scripts. Unfortunately the scripts were so different
from each other that no two were compatible. Klein says this forced
Cambodia to go back to the drawing board and design a script that was
internationally acceptable. After 18 months of hard work, the ministry of
education contacted the Open Forum with a view to developing local open
source software for local schools. The Unicode standards are defined by a
consortium based in the US but with representatives all over the world -
Africa is represented by the Agence Intergouvernementale de la
Francophonie.

http://www.sabcnews.com/sci_tech/internet/0,2172,108393,00.html