Development of Standards for Sinhala Computing

Abstract

Information technology has been used in Sri Lanka for about 20 years, but to a great extent, its use has been limited to those with a knowledge of English. And as these are a minority of the population, the larger proportion of Sri Lanka’s citizens has not been able to make use of the information revolution. A number of initiatives to introduce Sinhala computing have been made from the 1980s. We outline the progress of this work, and describe the work done by CINTEC and ICTA to support Sinhala computing. The encoding of Sinhala in a standard manner to facilitate information interchange, the development of Sinhala fonts, and Sinhala keyboards are described. We present the rationale of the design, and not simply the final standard.