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Localization Efforts in the Asia-Pacific ❘ 7The quality of the planning for Khmer, a crucial first step, is very high. As with other developing countries,funding and personnel to complete the work are the main hurdles. For more information on this area,please read Khmer Case Studies on pages 12-15.Case StudiesThai LocalizationFortunately for localizers, Thai language support has been stabilized by means of standardization achievedin the preceding years. The only limitation is the readiness of the internationalization frameworks withinGnome, KDE, Mozilla and Open Office.FOSS communities of Thailand contribute a lot to both software development and user support.Governmental organizations also play important roles in FOSS reaching the masses.Thai LanguageThe official language of Thailand is Thai. Spoken by almost the entire population, with several dialects indifferent regions, Thai is a tonal, uninflected and predominantly monosyllabic language. Most polysyllabicwords in the vocabulary have been borrowed, mainly from Khmer, Pali and Sanskrit.Thai belongs to the Tai language family, which includes languages spoken in Assam, northern Myanmar,Thailand, Lao PDR, northern Viet Nam, and the Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Guanxi. 4Thai script belongs to the Bhrami family. The oldest evidence of Thai script dates back over 700 years tothe Sukhothai Age. Over the years, Thai script has gradually changed. Contemporary Thai script iscomposed of 44 consonants, 21 vowel symbols (32 sounds when combined), four tone marks, two diacriticmarks and 10 decimal digits. Tone marks, diacritic marks and some vowel signs are stacked over or belowthe base consonants. The stacking is a shared characteristic among many South-East Asian scripts,especially those that are derived from Bhrami like Lao, Khmer and Myanmar languages. However, thereare no complex precombined conjuncts in Thai, unlike most Indic scripts (Devanagari, for example). Onlystacking is required. Lao is the script closest to Thai.StandardizationStandardization is the key to the success of Thai language support in computers. It allows interoperabilityand resolves many localization issues. Important standards include character set, keyboard layout andinput/output method specifications.The standardization of IT in Thailand has been recognized since 1984, 5 when there were many efforts touse the Thai language in computers. More than 26 sets of code pages were defined by different vendorsresulting in incompatibility. As a solution they were all unified as TIS 620-2529/1986 as the nationalstandard by the Thai Industrial Standard Institute (TISI). A prominent legacy was the code table definedby Kasetsart University (KU) in a successful R&D effort to enable the Thai system in MS-DOS. It was themost widely adopted standard. Therefore, computer programs were obliged to support both encodingsuntil TIS-620 became more popular and KU became obsolete.Therefore, when Microsoft released Windows into the Thai market, TIS-620 was the only encoding adopted.The same was true for Macintosh. Thus, the character encoding issue was firmly settled.In 1990, TIS-620 was amended to conform to ISO standards, but the code table was left completelyunchanged. This new version was called TIS 620-2533/1990. The amendment enabled TISI to activelyjoin many international standardization activities. For example, it submitted the character set to theEuropean Computing Manufacturers’ Association (ECMA) for registration in the ISO 2375 repertoire, andwas assigned as ISO-IR-166 so that it could be used with ISO/IEC 2022 mixed code page encoding. Anexample of such implementation is GNU Emacs. Around 1996, a TISI technical committee drafted aproposal for the Latin/Thai part (part 11) of ISO/IEC 8859, based on TIS-620. However, it was suspendeddue to the prohibition of combining characters. It was reactivated in 1999, and endorsed as aninternational standard in 2000.4Thai Language Audio Resource Center, ‘Some Historical Background of Thai Language’; available from thaiarc.tu.ac.th/thai/thai.htm.5Koanantakool, T. and the Thai API Consortium, Computer and Thai Language, National Electronics and Computer Technology Center,1987, in Thai.