MS launches Malayalam Language Interface Pack
Posted 3 February 06 under .
Microsoft has crossed yet another milestone in language computing. It has just released the Malayalam Language Interface Pack (LIP) for Windows XP which clearly shows that the tech giant is well on its way to fulfilling its commitment to providing local language interfaces in all national languages.
Says Raveesh Gupta, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft India, “the first adopters(of the new release) are expected to be government and public sector information workers, but the release is meant to bring technology closer to all citizens”.
Malayalam is only one of many LIPs released for India. So far Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Konkani, Bengali have been released.
Malayalam is spoken by approx. 35 million people in the Kerala, which is the most literate State in the country with a huge chunk of the population being computer-savvy as well.
Microsoft’s thrust in the language computing should be seen in the light of its drive in the e-governance space. As Gupta says, “The success of any e-governance application is completely based on being enabled in local languages. Hence, having this release will hugely boost our capability to drive the penetration of our platform”.
And as for the end user, especially in non-metros, where English is not exactly the language of choice, Gupta feels that “providing the capability to switch the interface and see it in local language would be a significant factor in getting users to experience the OS”.
Microsoft is expected to come out with Interface Packs for 7 more languages shortly.
Fun facts about Malayalam
• The first Malayalam dictionary was created by the German missionary Hermann Gundert who happens to be the grandfather of Nobel prize-winning German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse.
• English words of Malayalam origin are teak (taekku) and mango (maanga).
• Malayalam is the longest language name in English that is a palindrome (i.e., it can be read both forward and backward).
Script
Malayalam has a script of its own, an abugida of the Brahmic family. Like in all abugidas, or alphasyllabaries, characters for consonants have embedded vowels (or an extra diacritic showing that there is no vowel).
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