It's been in the works for the last two months as we coordinated the translation work from the very adept Mr. Oumar Bah, who now blogs (in French and Fula) at Konngol Afirik. And now, we're happy to announce that the Fula language version is live on Maneno! It's the 'FUL' option at the top for those who may know the language via a different spelling, such as 'Peul' in French.
Fula (or Fulfulde as it is known in the language) is spoken primarily in West Africa with around 16 million speakers or so according to Wikipedia. Although, it is the case that the amount of speakers could be as high as 50 million, as a commenter mentioned below. Given the number of dialects and the spread of the language, hard, fast numbers are hard to come by, but it is generally assumed that the Wikipedia article is far too conservative in its total.
The amount of countries that this language is spoken in to at least some extent is massive (take a look to the left), which is why we're very happy to have it as a language interface option. We hope that there will be a far reach with this language as Oumar is extremely well-versed in the Fula language mechanics. He compiled the first Fula-French online dictionary, which he is also looking to publish.
If you look at this language version of Maneno, you can see that there are similar issues as with the Bambara version in that there are a a number of characters which are outside the typical ones in the extended Latin alphabet. These should all have native supported on the internet, but that can support can sometimes be lacking. Thankfully, due to the Bambara experience, this was much less of a problem this time around, although Internet Explorer 6 simply will not display these characters, so upgrade if you can.
Again, we thank Oumar for all his work as well as Claire Ulrich who worked to connect us with Oumar in the first place.
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!
