African languages were in the news Unicode wise because data from a number of African languages was added to the latest version of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (UCDL). The hope is that this repository will make it easier to provide African-language software implementations (e.g. a Windows implementation in Hausa) and data presentations (e.g. a calendar in Afar).
If you are interested in implementing content in African languages, there are a number of resources available depending on what your goals are:
African Computing
These pages cover internationalization of African languages.
- Open Road African Language Guide
- African Network for Localisation – technical information and efforts to provide utilities for different languages
- PanAfrican Localisation project
- Bisharat Net – very technical information
African Languages
- UCLA AFLANG Directory
- Languages of South Africa
- Cornell African Writing Systems
- Penn Languages of Africa Resources
And lastly, the Penn State Computing with Resources site maintains several informational pages on working with text in multiple languages from Africa.
