Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Kabuverdianu

Waldir, one of the Betawiki volunteers has Cape Verdian Creole, or Kabuverdianu as his mother tongue. Kabuverdianu is a language, its ISO-639-3 code is kea. Waldir is one of the active localisers for Portuguese. His Babel information did not specify a mother tongue, his Portuguese profile provided this information so his information was completed.


I asked Waldir to add the Babel information on Betawiki and he had an initial problem with this. The Cape Verdian creole is not a homogeneous language; Cape Verde are 10 islands, and the language differs from island to island. The modern times brings radio, television and internet and as a consequence the differences are disappearing. There is also a movement to standardise the language. As Waldir is from one of the smaller islands, he is not comfortable writing the standard orthography.

We have agreed that it is best when the Babel information is in Kabuverdianu, so Waldir did localise the Babel extension. Betawiki now supports kea, it falls back to Portuguese and it will wait patiently for the moment when people want to start localising in earnest.

One thing I am really grateful for is that Waldir will provide information needed to support Kabuverdianu with locale data. This information is essential for a language to function on the Internet.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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