Wikimedia Mobile engineering/Language support

See also the mobile localization roadmap and mobile page views per language stats.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Language support in mobile platforms requires special attention since it defines the potential scope of the Wikimedia content and participation.

The meaning of Language Support edit

"Language support" is actually a vague term that may include different elements:

  • Fonts supported in browser.
  • Text input supported.
  • Text prediction supported.
  • Dictionaries supported.

Other elements to consider are:

  • Can the user install additional fonts, virtual keyboards, text prediction and orthography dictionaries?
  • Can the user get the supported languages anywhere or only in certain countries?

Usually high end devices get a wider support of languages out of the box regardless of the country of purchase, and can be expandable via free of charge or commercial language support packs. Usually the low end devices, with more demanding constraints, have language support specific to the market where they are sold and are not easily expandable - or not expandable at all.

It is relatively simple to reach the languages used by 90% of the non-mobile Wikimedia pages downloaded ([http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm see stats), but mobile devices represent a good opportunity to reach the speakers of dozens of languages that are starting to use the mobile Internet even without having used a standard computer before.

Language support table edit

Legend / instructions edit

  • Languages are sorted by scripts but the reality is more complicated since there are script variants, same language written in different scripts, etc. Feel free adding more details in the Observations.
  • Platforms supporting web fonts in the browser must be able to display the fonts in any script used in Wikimedia projects.
  • Testers: if you are official maintainers of the browser tested please add the name of your company / organization to your username.
  • Values used:

Data edit

Language support in mobile platforms
Script Languages Android BlackBerry iOS MeeGo Series 40 Symbian WebOS Windows Phone Maintainers
UNICODE All
WEB FONTS All
Arabic Arabic
Persian
Urdu
Armenian Armenian
Chinese Chinese simplified
Chinese traditional
Cyrillic Belarusian
Bulgarian
Kazakh
Kyrgyz
Macedonian
Mongolian
Russian
Serbian
Tajik
Ukrainian
Devanagari Hindi
Marathi
Ethiopic Amharic
Tigrinya
Georgian Georgian
Gurmukhī Punjabi
Greek Greek
Gujarati Gujarati
Hebrew Hebrew
Indic Assamese
Bengali
Sinhala
Tamil
Tibetan
Khmer Khmer
"Japanese" Japanese
Kannada Kannada
Latin Afrikaans
Albanian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Bosnian
Catalan
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Latvian
Estonian
English F I P D
Finnish
Galician
German
Hausa
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Lingala
Lithuanian
Malaysian
Norwegian
Portuguese
Romanian
Somali
Sotho
Spanish
Slovak
Slovenian
Swahili
Swedish
Tagalog
Turkish
Turkmen
Uzbek
Vietnamese F I P D
Welsh
Xhosa
Yoruba
Zazaki
Zulu
Lao Lao
Malayalam Malayalam
Oriya Oriya
Telugu Telugu
Thai Thai

Observations edit

Add here any comments you want to add to the table. Keep the alphabetical sorting of platforms / languages and sign your comment, please.

By platform edit

Series 40 edit

Even if Series 40 has in total a formidable range of language support, each device is subject to a specific regional language pack.--Qgil 23:55, 5 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

By language edit

Your language here edit