From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Apr 06 2006 - 11:04:11 CST
From: "Christopher Fynn" <cfynn@gmx.net>
> Phillipe
>
> The Dzongkha language does *not* suffer from political difficulties
> in Bhutan - in fact the Government of Bhutan very actively promotes
> Dzongkha as the national language. There is a whole department
> devoted to the (Dzongkha Development Authority) - as well as to
> the preservation of about 14 minority Bhutanese languages.
>
> BTW the initial version of a Linux release with the user interface of
> the whole GNOME desktop and a number of applications including
> OpenOffice & Mozilla translated to Dzongkha in Tibetan script is about
> to be released by the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of
> Communications in Bhutan.
I was not speaking about the situation of the Dzongkha language itself, but to the severe restrictions on accesses to Internet and free speech in Bhutan, and of related technologies. This is something that does not help much the development of an important written culture, and Dzongkha on computers then suffers from lack of independant development there.
Icouldsay the same about Korean, but the existence of a free culture in the South has forced the North Korean government to be involved too in the standardization of Korean on computers, if it did not want to be forced to use solutions developed only in the South, and that could have ignored the North Korean usages.
But I don't think that Dzongkha has such similar support, with a too little community of writers abroad (that may even use very often another script, for example Devanagari or Tibetan in India) to write their language and develop their culture.
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