My article about Burmese language has been published by the industry magazine MultiLingual. You can read a short excerpt below. The full text is available online at MultiLingual.
"What about localization? There are an estimated 111 languages spoken in Myanmar. Burmese is the official language and is spoken by most of the population as their mother tongue and almost all educated people in the country speak it. It is the language of education in primary and secondary schools while English is used at the tertiary level. The Burmese writing system derives from a Brahmi-related script borrowed from South India. The so-called Myazedi inscription inscribed in 1113 is the oldest surviving stone inscription of Burmese script. Aside from rounding of the originally square characters, this script has remained largely unchanged to the present.
The country almost entirely missed the computer revolution that swept most of the world in recent decades. Although character codes for Burmese languages have been allocated in Unicode since 1999, lack of agreement among stakeholders has slowed its universal adoption. There are currently several competing approaches in use. Some Burmese language websites have switched to Unicode rendering, some continue to use pseudo-Unicode fonts and others use an image-based method. . ."
