Wednesday, October 24th, 2001
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Scholars lobbying to have Hokkien added into Unicode

Linguistic scholars yesterday held a public hearing to broadcast their efforts to have the Romanized version of Hokkien, the mother tongue of most Taiwanese, incorporated into Unicode.

Unicode is an encoding system that enables software products and Web sites to function without re-engineering, regardless of language and computer platform.

Hokkien (河洛語), the language of the southern region of China's Fujian Province -- more commonly known as Min Nan Hua (閩南話) -- or, in Taiwan, simply as "Taiwanese," is the first language of about 14.35 million Taiwanese, or 67 percent of the population of Taiwan.

The scholars said that adding the Romanized version of the script to Unicode would enable computer users to key Hokkien into their computers. This would enhance the promotion and preservation of Taiwanese culture, the scholars say.

"One of the difficulties we find in our research of Taiwanese culture is the fact that we are not able to transfer our information on to the computer for storing." said Lu Hsin-chang (呂興昌), a professor in the Institute of Taiwanese Literature at National Cheng Kung University.

"In today's digital society, it is important that we have Taiwanese cultural information on the World Wide Web," Lu said, "so that anyone anywhere can access it and learn about Taiwan's culture."

The scholars, who said they hoped to receive financial support from the Ministry of Education and the Council for Cultural Affairs, plan to complete research on how to add Romanized Hokkien script to Unicode in time to submit a proposal to do so to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO/IEC 10646) group at its next meeting, in Dublin, Ireland, in May.

The ISO/IEC 10646 is the international standardization group that develops universal computer codes and approves scripts for incorporation into Unicode.

Wang Wen-pu (王文溥), deputy managing director of the Institute for Information Industry, said that the ISO/IEC 10646 is looking for two main points in the proposal.

"We need to prove [to the ISO] that the Latin letters of Romanized Hokkien do not yet exist in Unicode," said Wang, "and also that this new Unicode addition will serve a cultural function in its usage."

Liu Chieh-yua (劉杰岳), a software expert, said that ISO approval shouldn't be too difficult to obtain.

He said that the ISO had approved a Canadian Aboriginal tribe's application for its more than 100 unique symbols to be added to Unicode.

"I don't see why the ISO would not pass Taiwan's application, since Romanized Hokkien has only 37 unique symbols.

"Besides, Hokkien is spoken by a far greater number of people than [those who speak] the Canadian Aboriginal language," Liu said.

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