Iōng-chiá:Pektiong/20060408/Multilingualism

(Quasi)-Standardization

• Vietnam
  • Computerization of National and Ethnic Scripts

Vietnam is a country with many ethnic groups, with a culture that is mixed with many other cultures in the region throughout its history. In fact, the cultures of many neighboring countries still exist inside Vietnam as ethnic cultures, apart from those which have already joined into Vietnamese culture. From this point of view, Chinese, Thai, Khmer, Champa cultures clearly manifest themselves, particularly with scripts; besides these are more ethnic groups, but they are small in number and in general don't have their own script. The 1999 population is about 76 million people, of whom 13 percent are ethnic people, with: three million Thai speakers, one million Khmer, one million Hoa (Chinese), 200 000 Cham. The main scripts are: Quoc ngu and Chu Nom for the Vietnamese, Tai (for the Thai), Khmer, Cham, and Chinese; the remaining ethnic groups transcribe their own languages with Quoc ngu.

Quoc ngu is a Latin-based script, with additional tone marks, developed in the XVI century, and adopted as the national script since 1920. Before 1920, Chu Han and Chu Nom -- both using Han ideographs -- were the national scripts. Chu Han was used from the first century to X century, from whence Chu Nom was developed to better represent spoken Vietnamese.

The Tai script, according to some sources, first appeared around the X century, and belongs to the Pali family. Used mainly in northwest Vietnam, and influenced in modern times by the Quoc ngu script, the Tai script has been transformed, and differs slightly from the Thai script currently used in Thailand.

The Khmer script is used in the Khmer community of southern Vietnam, and is the same as the script in Cambodia. Chinese characters are used by the Hoa community, in southern Vietnam. Cham script is used by the Cham community in central and southern Vietnam. The scripts in Vietnam today belong to many families of scripts in the world: ideographs, Latin, Pali.

The right of each ethnic group to their own script as well as their culture is enshrined in the Constitution. Quoc ngu is the national script, and is taught to all children. But ethnic children have the right to learn their own script at primary school, in addition to the national script. For ethnic groups without their own script, their writing system is created based on Quoc ngu. If an ethnic group has many script dialects, efforts have been made to unify them.

• Taiwan
  • Ethnics scripts for Formosan languages
  • 原民會與教育部共同編印了「原住民族語言書寫系統」
  • Pe̍h-oē-jī

• It is not enough, however, to simply store your data in Unicode. Victor Gaultney, creator of Gentium
• Font (Not addressed in Wikipedia/MediaWiki)
• Input Method (Not addressed in Wikipedia/MediaWiki)

MediaWiki as a platform for multilingualism and multiculturalism

• Local (Geographical)
• Local (Linguistic)
• (Virtual) Imagined Community
• (Further) Localization ( example: Localized Sort )