Summary tables of tone mark data from 21 (African) countries

Source: http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/tones.htm

Summary tables of tone mark data from 21 countries /
Résumé en tableaux des données sur marques de ton de 21 pays
by / par Lee Pearce

African Tone Symbols for Keyboards

✷       Realizing that tones are not always marked for [some] African languages, we propose including them on keyboards only so that they are available for those who may want or need them.

✷       We put this material together for the sole purpose of determining the minimum set of symbols required for keyboards targeted at the country level.

✷       The data follows the format of the 21 country tables presented on the Bisharat website [A12n gateway page] and is drawn [mainly] from the Hartell study [Rhonda L. Hartell, ed. 1993. The Alphabets of Africa. Dakar: UNESCO & SIL].

✷       Since tone data was not available for all of the languages, some comments are added to clarify the source material.

(1)     No tone data available in Hartell study [or not a tonal language – DZO]

(2)     No orthographic material available under this language in the Rosetta Project.

 See the table

African languages: Localisation and the one laptop per child project

One earlier criticism of the ‘one laptop per child‘ project was its emphasis on English. As the project develops there is now an initiative on localisation and the development of a multilingual keyboard for the XO laptop. Through the wiki there is a call out for translators and developers to work on this as volunteers.

From: the Hausa charsets and keyboard list.The One Laptop Per Child project (see m115) has a page for people who want to work on localization at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pootle#Sign-up . For languages like Hausa not yet in the table, it looks like you will have to add appropriate rows in order to enter your name.