Office 2007 Language Interface Packs and spell-checkers are now available for Bengali (Bangladesh), Urdu, Sinhalese, Nepali, IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, and Afrikaans
Several Indic and African languages have recently been added to the list of Office 2007 Language Interface Packs which can be freely downloaded by users who wish to change the language of their user interface and make use of a spell-checker. The new LIPs include Bengali (Bangladesh), Urdu, Sinhalese, Nepali, Afrikaans, IsiZulu, and IsiXhosa. The Sinhalese, Bengali (Bangladesh) and IsiXhosa spell-checkers are totally new, since previous versions of Office did not include any proofing tools for these languages.
Like all the other Office 2007 LIPs we have discussed on this blog, these new language packs have been developed within the framework of the Microsoft Local Language Program, whose aim is to preserve local and regional languages and cultures and to enable users of software to work with interfaces in their own languages. You can click on the languages below to download the corresponding LIPs for Microsoft Office 2007:
· Bengali (বাংলা (বাংলাদেশ)) is the official language of Bangladesh (where it is spoken by around 110 million people) and the official language of the Indian States of West Bengal (with 55 million speakers) and Tripura. With more than 200 million speakers, it is the second most widely spoken language on the Indian subcontinent and among the 5 languages with the most native speakers worldwide. Together with Assamese and Oriya (for which we also recently released LIPs and new spellcheckers), it belongs to the Eastern Indo-Aryan language family.
· Urdu (اردو) is the national language and one of the two official languages of Pakistan. It is also one of the 22 official languages of India (it is spoken in 5 Indian states). There are about 60 million Urdu native speakers (for a total of around 180 million speakers).
· Sinhalese (a.k.a. Sinhala, or සිංහල) is the language of the Sinhalese, the largest ethnic group of Sri Lanka. It is spoken by about 19 million speakers (including 16 million native speakers). Along with Tamil, it is one of the official languages of Sri Lanka.
· Nepali (नेपाली), a language in the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family, is the lingua franca of Nepal and is one of the official languages of India. It is also spoken in Bhutan and in parts of Myanmar. It is commonly written in the Devanagari script and is closely related to Hindi. There are about 20 million native speakers worldwide.
· IsiZulu, a Bantu language, has more than 9 million native speakers (with about 25 million second language speakers). It is one of the 11 official languages of South Africa and it is also spoken in other countries like Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Malawi and Swaziland.
· IsiXhosa, an agglutinative Bantu language with about 8 million speakers, is another one of the 11 official languages of South Africa.
· Afrikaans, a Germanic language derived from the same 16th-century Dutch dialect that led to modern Dutch, is one of the 11 official languages of South Africa. It is mainly spoken in South Africa and in Namibia, Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland. After Zulu and Xhosa, Afrikaans has the third-largest language community in South Africa, with about 6 million speakers.
-- Thierry Fontenelle (Program Manager)
