"Wogbɛ Jɛkɛ" & Ghanaian language input support

Came across mention on Twitter of the Ghanaian play "Wogbɛ Jɛkɛ - A Tale of Two Men" but with the Ga words in the title written "Wogb3 j3k3":

#Wogb3 J3k3:The Tale of Two Men is running again tonight at the ETS DRAMA STUDIO on Legon campus at exactly 7:30pm pic.twitter.com/eN3xK467Mm

— Akwesi Agyeman (@BigYinks) October 7, 2016

In fact, looking at Twitter and at the web via a Google search, one notes both this workaround and the correct spelling, as well as the ASCIIfied version, "wogbe jeke."

7 vowels and a 5 vowel keyboard

Ga, a Ga-Dangme language of southernmost Ghana, has a complex vowel system, with seven vowels distinguished in its writing system: a; e; i; o; and u; plus ɛ ("open e") and ɔ ("open o"). The latter two are used to write many other African languages such as Akan, Ewe, Mende, Bambara, and Lingala.¹ (These characters, like a number of other Latin letters, are also in the International Phonetic Alphabet.)

Many fonts include the ɛ and ɔ, however typing them is not facilitated by standard keyboards. There are keyboard layouts specially conceived for Ga (see below for a list), as well as for Akan, Ewe, and others. However, there apparently are not any keyboards to enable multilingual input - such as an Akan title included in a tweet in English. Or if there are, they are not widely used. Hence resort to "3" for "ɛ" and ")" (the right parentheses) for "ɔ."

In African Languages in a Digital Age (p. 61) I outlined several workarounds for text including extended Latin characters not supported in fonts or input systems, a summary that was a revision of something published a decade earlier.² I had not, however, noted the use of numbers or symbols among the "substitution solutions." Ade Sawyerr, who has worked with Ga input issues, mentions observing these particular substitutions - "3" and ")" - as well as others, such as "rj" for the letter "ŋ" ("eng"), which is also used in Ga.

In any event, the resort in the mid-2010s to 3's and )'s to type words in languages like Ga, Akan, and Ewe that use them is evidence of missing input options on the devices used, or inconvenience of existing options, or perhaps lack of awareness of available keyboard apps on the part of users.

Some keyboard layouts for Ga

Over the last couple of decades, and especially since the availability of keyboard utilities like Keyman and Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC), there have been many keyboard layouts developed for languages such as those of Ghana that have extended Latin orthographies. A full discussion is beyond this blog post, but generally speaking, keyboards incorporating characters not on the standard computer keyboards work either through changing key assignments (such as "q" is not used in Ga, so "ŋ" is substituted for it) or via a combination or sequence of key strokes. The solution with changed keys seems to be more common on mobile device applications, whereas both approaches are found in keyboard layouts used on computers.

Kasahorow Android keyboards
menu selection

A selection of Ga keyboards:

• Online, works on-screen with keyboard or point and click; produces text for copy-paste (all 4 keyboards look to be the same)
• Free-online-writing.com Ga Virtual Keyboard
• Get2home.com Ga Keyboard
• Keyboardingonline.net Online Ga Keyboard
• Loderi.com Ga Virtual Keyboard Online
• Downloadable Ga keyboard for Windows, made with MSKLC via Kasahorow
• Ghanaian languages keyboards, which include Ga, for Android from via Kasahorow
• Ghana Keyboards, which include Dangme, via Keyman

There likely are others for Ga (and the closely related Dangme). There definitely are a number for other languages of Ghana such as Akan (or its varieties, Twi Ashanti, Twi Akuapem, and Fante), Ewe, and Dagaare.

However, more could be done to facilitate multilingual typing, so that one doesn't have to switch keyboards or keep track of key sequences to insert something like Wogbɛ Jɛkɛ in an English tweet, or say a Hausa word with a hooked letter in a text in Akan (hooked letters are not part of the Akan orthography). Could for example an extra line of keys be added to touchscreen keyboards - say on a Ghana English keyboard - with the extra characters needed for Ghanaian languages?

About "Wogbɛ Jɛkɛ"

Wogbɛ jɛkɛ is a Ga term with meanings of "we have come from far" and "our journey is still long." It is used in the title of two plays written by Chief Abdul Moomen Muslim about the historical events, beginning with "Wogbɛ Jɛkɛ: Birth of a Nation," which depicts pre-colonial history of what is now Ghana, and followed by "Wogbɛ Jɛkɛ: The Tale of Two Men," which is centered around the stories of J.B. Danquah and Kwame Nkrumah during Ghana's independence struggle.

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1. Some Nigerian languages like Yoruba and Igbo instead use sub-dotted characters - ẹ and ọ - for these vowels.
2. Don Osborn, 2001, "The knotty problem of using African languages for e-mail and internet," Balancing Act News Update, 69.

Writing Bambara right

How to compose text in the Latin-based orthography of the Bambara language of Mali? One question raised by an ebola poster in non-standard Bambara (see previous posting) is whether the modified letters (technically "extended characters") in the Bambara alphabet  discourage use of the standard orthography. There are two potential issues - fonts and keyboards - although noting use of standard Bambara in other materials, these are not the impediment they once were. I'll briefly discuss both below, after a quick intro to written Bambara.

Bambara orthography

The Bambara alphabet today includes the following characters:

a  b  c  d  e  ɛ  f  g  h  i  j  k  l  m  n  ɲ  ŋ  o  ɔ  p  r  s  t  u  w  y  z

Digraph consonants (two letters to represent one sound) have been phased out of use, such that "ny" is now "ɲ" (in Senegalese orthography this would be "ñ"). However, "sh" is still used - although the IPA borrowing for this sound - "ʃ" - is sometimes seen (just today noted it in an email by odd coincidence). Double vowels however are used, for words where the vowel sound is slightly prolonged.

Bambara is a tonal language. The two tones are rarely marked, but when they are, accent marks are used. (A change in the alphabet some years ago from "è" and "ò" to "ɛ" and "ɔ" permitted marking of tones with accents rather than underscores for low tone).

Fonts

Time was, the lack of fonts (and before Unicode became the dominant standard, character encoding behind the fonts and the lack of compatibility among different 8-bit fonts) presented the main problem for creating and sharing text in Bambara with the extended characters ɛ, ɲ, ŋ, and ɔ.

Font support for extended Latin characters is still uneven, though current operating systems can substitute a missing character from another font (all being encoded in Unicode). As I compose this posting, I note Blogger's default font lacking 3 of the 4 extended characters from the obvious substitution (per figure above from screenshot; background color added). On the other hand, the font for the published posting does include these characters. So no substitution is necessary.

Basically this means that most of the time, one can display the needed characters, but for aesthetic reasons, fonts that include all of those characters would be preferable. In finding fonts, it is helpful to know that the needed extended characters may be spread among several Unicode "blocks." For Bambara this means a font will have to have, in addition to the basic Latin blocks common to any font with Latin characters, the following extended blocks:

• Latin Extended-A (Ŋ, ŋ)
• Latin Extended-B (Ɛ, Ɲ, Ɔ)
• IPA Extensions (ɛ, ɲ, ɔ)
• Combining Diacritic Marks (if tone marking is needed)

Latin Extended-A is fairly common in fonts, but not the other three above. (If needed, the "ʃ" and its capital form would be covered by the IPA and Extended-B ranges.)

Alan Wood's extensive list of "Unicode character ranges and the Unicode fonts that support them" is an excellent resource for finding fonts for specific Unicode ranges. (Sill looking for a resource that would allow one to choose several Unicode blocks and get a list of fonts that cover them.)

Keyboards

Since display of extended characters is no longer the impediment it used to be, the big issue now seems to be how to efficiently compose text with extended characters that are not supported by computer keyboards (i.e., not via inserting symbol in a wordprocessor or cutting and pasting characters from another source). This means use of alternative keyboard drivers or onscreen keyboards or character pickers.

In the latter category, there are a couple of websites worth noting. In both, one types from one's keyboard and then clicks on extended characters, producing text onscreen that can be copied and pasted elsewhere:

• Lexilogos has a page for Bambara, featuring a window where one can type basic Lain characters and then click on the extended ones onscreen (and diacritics for accents).
• Richard Ishida has a more complex IPA Character Picker enabling input of many more extended Latin characters.

Keyboard drivers enable one to use one's existing keyboard in any application. These generally use either Tavultesoft Keyman or Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC). A short list of links to current keyboard drivers useful for composing in Bambara follows (with thanks to Valentin Vydrin, who shared this on the Translating Hope list). I'll add to this but encourage comments with additional information:

• Via Mali Pense site (see under "ÉCRIRE LE BAMBARA - ka bamanankan sɛbɛn"). Note also a spell checker ("vérificateur orthographique"; see under "POUR ÉCRIRE SANS FAUTES - Fililatilennan sɛbɛnni na")
• Via LLACAN site (see under "Saisir des caractères spéciaux sous windows.")

Touchscreen keyboards for African languages?

Who's doing what with touchscreen (virtual) keyboards for African languages? Although not a big fan of them for my personal use, I've long recognized that in principle they offer the potential to bypass the obvious limitations of physical computer keyboards - with their fixed number of keys - for layouts supporting various extended Latin character sets. This is important for a number of major languages of West and Central Africa whose orthographies include extended characters.

It was a friend's recent mention of someone else's mention of developing a Hausa keyboard for Nuance Swype that has me trying to get up to speed on where virtual keyboards for touchscreens are now, with particular reference to African languages.

If your keyboard is basically an interactive picture, then it would seem to offer the potential to modify and modestly expand to accommodate different alphabets such that of Hausa (adding rather than substituting keys would be easier on a larger screen of course - tablet rather than smartphone). Has this been done for African languages (other than Arabic, which benefits in terms of computer support from its wide international usage)?

Putting the question regarding Hausa - with additional reference to Apple touchscreen keyboards - to the old Hausa charsets & keyboards forum got helpful replies from Tom Gewecke (whose Multilingual Mac blog is an excellent source of info on iOS as well as Mac for diverse languages). Seems that iPhone and iPad support for a language like Hausa that is written with extended Latin (leaving aside the question of Ajami for another post) requires apps, and then cutting and pasting to use what one produces with them into whatever one is working on (email, document).

But there's lot's more going on with touchscreen keyboards. Looking for more information on Swype (which claims support for 70+ languages), I'm coming across mention of a number of other touchscreen keyboards and character selection apps. This is a question I plan to come back to but would appreciate any information from others.