Typing in the Native Language

A step-by-step walkthough for setting up your computer to type in your language

The basics

For a long time, speakers of indigenous languages needed a specially designed font to be able to type in the language. Due to technology limitations in the past, the only practical way to get non-European characters to show on screen was to reorder the characters in a standard font, and replace English letters with Native letters. On this page, these old fonts will be called legacy fonts. These have led to several problems, including:

  • To read a document, you need to have a very specific font installed. Without that font, the words are unreadable.
  • It becomes virtually impossible to type a multi-lingual document, for example, an Native Language–English glossary. The only way to do this is to manually switch fonts everytime the language changes.
  • For some accents–like the low-line–many people had little choice but to use underlining formatting in their word processor. This solution is very troublesome because formatting is typically erased in e-mails, databases, and any time you copy text from one program to another.

The keyboarding and font system offered by Languagegeek solves all these problems. Please keep in mind that, in an attempt to make keyboarding simpler, Languagegeek keyboards and Unicode fonts do not necessarily follow the patterns of legacy fonts. I have produced a presentation which I use in the classroom setting that more fully explains how these legacy fonts have become obsolete, and how Unicode represents language.

To type in your Native language, you will need to have two things.

  1. A good Unicode font with full coverage of your language’s writing system (Latin, Syllabics, and/or Cherokee). Several of these fonts are available for free download from Languagegeek.com
  2. A keyboard layout specifically designed for your language.

Fonts

Installing a good Unicode font will provide you with a way to both read and type anything in the Native language. The process is different for Mac and Windows’ systems.

Keyboards

Each language, or dialect of a language, may require its own keyboard layout. This is a computer file which tells the computer which keyboard key produces which on-screen character. For example, in the US English keyboard layout file, there is a command which states that the shift-2 key types the @ sign. But in the French Canadian keyboard layout file, a different command says that this key types the double quote ".

Most Native languages have a few characters which are not typable in the standard US keyboard layout. To fix this problem, new keyboard layouts have been designed and placed on the Languagegeek.com website for many Native languages. There are three keyboard layout formats: Windows built-in, Keyman, and Mac. The Mac format is self explanitory. For Windows, the built-in format installs the keyboard layout directly into Windows itself. This format is the most stable, but it is also the most difficult to install. Keyman is a program which runs alongside Windows which takes over control of the keyboard. This method requires a quick installation process, but it also can install fonts at the same time. At the moment, all available keyboard layouts are in the Windows built-in format (except for syllabics, which must be in Keyman). I am currently finishing off the Mac keyboards, and then will move on to Keyman.
Home Previous Page Last Update: Tuesday, June 27, 2006