Oops, we did it again

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/11/30 00:01 -08:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/11/30/498186.aspx

Nepali (sometimes also referred to as "Nepalese") is the official language of Nepal where it is spoken by roughly half the population as a mother tongue and by about 2 million people as a second language. It is related to Hindi but has borrowed less words from Persian and English (instead using more Sanskrit derivations) and it has been influenced by the neighboring Tibeto-Burman languages.

This is just great news. In countries like India/Nepal language along with cost are the primary blockers for computer adoption. Right now here in India we are at the verge of a massive wave in which computers reach into remote areas. With Post-offices/rural-Banks setting up Kiosks in small towns and remote districts, local language support in the interfaces become super-important.

The importance of language packs are also supported by the sheer number. For example my mother language Bengali or Bangla (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali) is the fourth or fifth most widely spoken language in the world with over 200 million native speakers.

Currently Windows and other MS products like Word, Outlook work like a charm with Bangla and I feel really happy when I get to send emails in my native language which was not possible even couple of years ago. I have worked in the internationization team in Adobe working on a product called FrameMaker and I know the pain of developing libraries like Uniscribe and ICU...

অভিনব বসু

And at some point I stumbled on a web page (on the MS web site) listing even more LIPs.
And the following languages where marked "Windows Language Interface Pack Available Soon":
Afrikaans
Bengali
Bosnian
Georgian
Kannada
Konkani
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Sepedi (Northern Sotho)
Norwegian (Nynorsk)
Punjabi
Quechua
Telugu
Tswana
Urdu
Xhosa
Zulu

Nepali was not even there, but is out :-)
Again, cool!