The coded character set of Pakistan's national language, Urdu has been standardized and its mapping into Unicode has been discussed in an earlier paper published in IUC22. This paper contains a similar exercise for four important regional languages of Pakistan i.e. Balochi, Punjabi, Pushto and Sindhi. The paper provides background information about these languages: their history, characteristics and usage along with samples from published material. It presents character sets of these languages and identifies mappings of their characters to Unicode.

The issues discussed in the paper will provide a basis for future research towards codifying the characters of these languages, in identifying relationship with Unicode as well as in formulating sets of collating sequences and associated algorithms.

Keywords

Balochi, Character codes, Code table, Coded character set, Encoding, Multilingual Processing, Punjabi, Pushto, Sindhi, Standardization, Unicode

Conclusion

ISO/IEC 10646 /Unicode is fast assuming a standard for representing national character codes. It is imperative that all the major languages of the South Asian region are represented in Unicode so that associated multilingual application development can take place. This paper takes a step in this direction by identifying the character sets of four important regional languages of Pakistan and mapping their characters to Unicode.