In constantly striving to create a more accessible platform, we at Maneno are always on the lookout for new languages to make the site available in because let's face it, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish versions are great, but we feel that the true strength of the site will be having the native languages of Africa available as well. Because of that, there is the Swahili version and soon (hopefully very soon) we will have a version in Bambara. In case you haven't heard of this language, let me assure you that this is not an April Fool's. This is a West African language that is spoken by around 2-3 million people. Naturally, it doesn't have a strong online presence, but we're hoping that this can change in the future because of efforts like this. I mean, if Slovenian, which is spoken by 2.4 million people can have a Wikipedia with over 100,000 entries, why not Bambara?
When it comes to integrating African languages in a website, one such as Swahili is overall, rather easy to implement. It uses a strictly English, Latin alphabet for the base of its characters. Bambara however gets considerably more complex. There are a number of characters which are in addition to the Latin base such as ɛ, ɔ, and ɲ (or ŋ depending on the dialect.) Typing these characters is a problem because there is no native support in Windows or the Mac OS.
By way of my pain, I would just like to point people to Sil, a group which has created a keyboard for Bambara and other languages, albeit a keyboard that is only for Windows machines. That takes care of the typing. There is still the issue of the displaying. For that, you need to encode your pages as UTF-8 which amazingly, actually supports these characters, although possibly not in every font for the web, so your kilometerage may vary. There is also the issue that any translation file needs to be created, from the start as a Unicode file. Regular files will just end up mashing up the extended characters.
That is a quick overview of the problems. I hope that it helps others who might be trying to do something similar with Bambara or other languages on the web. Obviously, once we launch this version of the site, you can be sure that we'll let everyone know about it as we think it will be pretty darned cool to have!
