Thanks to Maneno blogger Malaidea, Maneno will have a tiny little presence in Sudan... via our stickers! We don't know if in between watching Tom & Jerry in Arabic, drinking tea and eating shortbread with British colleagues, struggling to make her wardrobe appropriate... oh, and international lawyering, she'll find the time to blog about her Sudan adventures. But at least we're happy to see that Maneno has established a firm presence in the country!
We'll stay tuned to find out if the stickers make it safely to Darfur or not...
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.
