Om: one tool for many (Indian) languages

Abstract

Many different languages are spoken in India, each language being the mother tongue of tens of millions of people. While the languages and scripts are distinct from each other, the grammar and the alphabet are similar to a large extent. One common feature is that all the Indian languages are phonetic in nature. In this paper we describe the development of a transliteration scheme Om which exploits this phonetic nature of the alphabet. Om uses ASCII characters to represent Indian language alphabets, and thus can be read directly in English, by a large number of users who cannot read script in other Indian languages than their mother tongue. It is also useful in computer applications where local language tools such as email and chat are not yet available. Another significant contribution presented in this paper is the development of a text editor for Indian languages that integrates the Om input for many Indian languages into a word processor such as Microsoft Win Word®. The text editor is also developed on Java® platform that can run on Unix machines as well. We propose this transliteration scheme as a possible standard for Indian language transliteration and keyboard entry.