Issues in Encoding the Writing of Nepal’s Languages

Abstract

The major language of Nepal, known today as Nepali, is spoken as mother tongue by nearly half the population, and as a second language by nearly all of the rest. A considerable volume of computational linguistics work has been done on Nepali, both in research establishments and commercial organizations. However there are another 94 languages indigenous to the country, and the situation for these is not good. In order to apply computational linguistics methods to a language it must first be represented in the computer, but most of the languages of Nepal have no written tradition, let alone any support by computers. It is the written form that is needed for full computational processes, and it is here that we encounter barriers or at best inappropriate compromises. We will look at the situation in Nepal, ignoring the 17 cross-border languages where the major speaker population lies outside Nepal. We are left with only three languages with written traditions: Nepali which is well served, Newari with over 1000 years of written tradition but which so far has been frustrated in attempts to encode its writing, and Limbu which does have its writing encoded though with defects. Many of the remaining languages may be written in Devanagari, but aspire to something different that relates to their languages and has a more visually distinctive writing to mark their identity. We look at what can be done for these remaining languages and speculate whether a common writing system and encoding could cover all the languages of Nepal. Inevitably we must focus on the current standard for the computer encoding of writing, Unicode, but we find that while language activists in Nepal do not adequately understand what is possible with the technology and pursue objectives within Unicode that are not necessary or helpful, external experts only have limited understanding of all the issues involved and the requirements of living languages and their users and instead pursuing scholarly interests which offer limited support for living users.