54 Afrigen locales included in CLDR 1.8

Published: 17 Mar 2010

The Afrigen team is proud to announce that 54 African locales have been submitted to Unicode, and included in the CLDR 1.8 release. Out of the 54 locales, 41 was completely new to CLDR, while 13 was improvements of existing locales.

This bulk submission of locales has greatly improved the footprint of African languages in CLDR, that hosted only 10+ in the previous release (most of them created by LocaleGEN, the predecessor of Afrigen). The next step for these African locales is submission to OpenOffice.org.

If you want to see a beautiful script that finally has made it to CLDR, have a look at Tachelhit, a Berber language spoken by 300,000 people in Morocco written in Tifinagh. The Tifinagh script is used by around 20 million people in Morocco for writing Berber languages including Tarifite, Tamazighe, and Tachelhite [source: www.unicode.org].

If your local language is not included in CLDR and you are willing to spend a few hours creating a locale, please contact us!

Four years creating OpenOffice.org and Unicode locales

Published: 28 Jan 2010

What started as a small programming project it has now became the reference software to create locales for OpenOffice.org and Unicode. Our first tool (localegen) has generated 170 locales in four years. Around 25% of them has made them all the way into OpenOffice.org and Unicode's Locale Repository.

Locales come from all other the world, latest additions include: Uyghur, Maithili, Urdu, Maltese, Sardinian, Asturian and an Arabic-based locale for Oman.

During 2009, we rewrote localegen to facilitate the creation of 100 African locales. Today, Afrigen is the major effort in the world to submit African locales to Unicode!.

As you can imagine, tools need to be adapted with time and managing so many languages, scripts and features still takes considerable time of our research and development. In 2010, we are looking for a sponsor to continue our work, we plan to include more advance features in our tools (support for collation, community grading of locales, discussion forums, etc). Interested? Drop us a line!

We want to thank the IDRC for supporting us and our partner in the 100 African Locales Initiative, Kamusi Project International , as part of ANLoc. Thanks to the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden for hosting our development platform. Specially, we want to thank all contributors that have made Localegen and Afrigen a success!. We love to see (our) software used!