Native language blogging in Sri Lanka

Just a heads up to let you all know that you can now blog in Singhalese using a standard English keyboard and minimal effort. Indi has developed a new font for phonetic singhalese that relies on english letters (romanization) to sound out (phonetically spell) singhalese words. As for Tamil there has been a lot more work on developing it. Here is a good starting point.

You need to install the ekottu font and enable the International keyboard[Instructions (pdf)]. Once you have done this you can type singhalese in most of the Winodws applications (eg. MS Office apps, etc) using the Keymaps.

I don't plan to blog in Singhalese anytime in the near future as my written word is atrocious due to a lack of usage. Given past expreiences, it takes me a period of 2-3 weeks in SL to regain fluency in just reading the language. It's quite easy to use this method. Even with my limited grasp of the language I can type out stuff like

dAn' siØíhl BaSaevn' b'elog' krn'D puluvn'

Chandare has good examples of bilungual blogging. Thanks Indi, keep scratching those itches. Hm, that doesn't sound too good but you know what I mean.