Writing systems

We need to support all of the writing systems (alphabets, syllabaries, logographs) used for major languages of countries that join the OLPC project. Support includes

• Fonts
• Locales
• Keyboards and Input Methods
• Renderinng for screen and printer
• Text-to Speech
• OCR

Several countries have expressed interest in OLPC. Here are their basic requirements for writing systems and languages:

• India -- 10 official writing systems, 20 official languages
• China -- Simplified Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, and others
• Egypt -- Arabic
• Nigeria -- Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba
• Brazil -- Portuguese
• Argentina -- Spanish
• Thailand -- Thai

In every one of these countries there are dozens to hundreds of minority languages.

The following links give information on the topics listed above for a particular writing system, to the extent that contributors to the project have found them. If you know of other issues or resources, please add them on the appropriate pages.

Extended Latin -- Western European languages and more than a thousand others

Arabic -- Arabic, Farsi (Iranian), Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Sindhi, Hausa and others. A number of languages formerly written in Arabic are now written in the Latin alphabet. This includes Turkish, Swahili, Bahasa Melayu/Bahasa Indonesya, and others.

Hebrew -- Yiddish, Ladino, etc.

Cyrillic (Кирилица) -- Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, and other Turkic languages, etc. More than 200 other languages were written in Cyrillic under Soviet rule.

Greek -- and Coptic

Armenian

Georgian

Syriac -- Liturgical language

Ethiopic -- For Languages of Ethiopia using Ethiopic alphabet. Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo, Gurage, etc

Thaana -- for the Dhivehi language of the Republic of Maldives

Devanagari -- Hindi, Marathi, Nepali etc.

Bengali

Gujarati

Gurmukhi -- for Punjabi

Kannada

Malayalam

Oriya

Tamil

Telugu

Urdu

Sinhala -- (Sri Lanka)

Myanmar

Thai

Lao ພາສາລາວ

Khmer (Cambodia)

Tibetan -- Tibetan, Dzongkha (Bhutan)

Mongolian

Traditional Chinese

Simplified Chinese

Japanese

Korean

Cherokee

Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics -- Native American languages of Canada and the Northern USA, including Inuktitut

Yi -- Minority language in China

Braille -- for the blind, in many languages

Limbu

Tai Le

Philippine Scripts -- obsolete

Osmanya

Math

APL -- A Programming Language

Dead and Artificial Scripts

Linux systems now routinely come with support for 20 or more of these writing systems, and there are free tools for making keyboard layouts for any language and writing system. There are also large Unicode fonts such as Code2000 with the characters for even more writing systems.

Windows and Macintosh also support many writing systems with fonts and keyboards.

External links

Unicode code charts for all of these writing systems are available online in PDF format, so you can see the characters even if you don't have a matching font installed on your computer.