Challenges of enabling IT in the Sinhala Language

Abstract

Although Sinhala is the national language of Sri Lanka, even in 2004 most computer operating systems, databases and applications were in English and only a handful of Sinhala websites existed. Many people thought that “computers don’t work in Sinhala”. Sinhala was included in Unicode in 1998, but there were no implementations even by 2002. This paper first examines why IT in Sinhala was slow to develop. It then describes the development of Sinhala computing over the last two years, and the challenges faced. One reason for the non-adoption of Unicode was that the Unicode standard, as published, did not specify some common symbols and ligatures, which led to a perception that Unicode did not properly support Sinhala. Unicode was also complex, and difficult to understand. Another issue was the lack of operating system support, especially in Microsoft Windows. We were successful not only in defining the full representation of Sinhala script in Unicode, but also the specification and deployment of Sinhala computer keyboards. We learned that perception and prioritisation are as important as technical issues in enabling IT in a language.