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Organizing Information About the World’s Languages
In order to facilitate the use of all languages in cyberspace equally, members
of the language communities themselves and other interested parties need to
be able to collect, organize and share information in and about all languages
accurately and consistently. Multiple organizations, including the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO), the Unicode Consortium and others,
develop and support standards that facilitate this work.
SIL International supports these efforts to enhance data sharing based on these
standards. The following paragraphs will provide information on some recent
developments.
Introducing ScriptSource
In June 2011, SIL International released a powerful web-based resource called
ScriptSource. ScriptSource is a dynamic, collaborative reference to the writing
systems of the world, with detailed information on scripts, characters and
languages.
A writing system for an individual language is composed of several elements
including the script and individual characters. A language may be supported
by several writing systems based on historic, political, educational or other
reasons. Scripts, characters and language names are all currently codified by
international standards, however the complex relationships between these
elements are often not well understood or well documented.
ScriptSource seeks to bring together authoritative information from standards
and other recognized resources with contributions from the global community
to document the writing systems of the world. We hope this resource will
help bring visibility to the richness of languages and writing systems, as well
as to help researchers, designers, linguists and software developers with the
complex task of supporting the world’s languages in different information and
communication technologies.
While almost 7000 living languages are spoken in the world today, only around
130 scripts are used to write them—if they have a written form. An individual
script, such as Latin, Arabic or Cyrillic, is thus used to write many different
languages. The set of characters used to write a specific language within a
script is based on the linguistic characteristics of the language. These, and
other elements, go into defining a writing system for a language.
For minority languages that use a majority language script, documenting
the elements of the writing system makes it possible to develop computing
solutions that support the language. As an example, while the use of Cyrillic
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