[beAbU]

It's interesting, having grown up in Africa, and lived there almost 35 years, reading, writing and speaking an African language, being surrounfed by at least 10 other African languages and seeing them written, that I have never ever in my entire life encountered this writing system.

I think the product is a great technological achievement, but...

I would warn against the generalisation of "African" in this context. It does not tell the full picture, and simplifies the rather complex and very ancient reality that is language on the continent of Africa.

[teractiveodular]

FWIW, the only languages supported appear to be Amharic (modern Ethiopian), Ge'ez (classic Ethiopian, basically only used in church liturgy today), and one rather obscure language (Nufi/Fefe, ~140k speakers) spoken in a small part of Cameroon. This is indeed a pretty long way from being a pan-African solution.

[pythonbrad]

It’s true that we currently have few languages in our dataset, but by supporting Nufi, we are supporting all Cameroonian languages since their alphabets have been standardized under the General Alphabet of Cameroonian Languages (GACL). Additionally, we support the CLAFRICA code, which allows for typing in GACL. This GACL indirectly supports other African languages as well.

Regarding Geez and Amharic, the objective was to support a language distinct from Latin. Its implementation allows us to avoid being limited to Latin-based languages.

[geenkeuse]

Can't wait for you to get started with the oldest languages on the planet, as spoken by the oldest people on Earth, the Khoisan languages. Hope that is in the pipeline, as the Khoi and San is almost eradicated in all of Africa and many of their languages are now extinct.

Khoekhoe is a nice start.

I think people will lose their minds if they see how it is written.

Fun fact - The Khoisan gave all the Bantu languages that have it, the click sound.

There are a lot of different clicks in the Khoisan languages. So many that they need exclamation marks and every other symbol on the keyboard to accommodate them.

[samatman]

> the oldest languages on the planet, as spoken by the oldest people

Begging your pardon, this is a nonsensical thing to say. One people are not older than another, and nor are their languages.

As it happens, the Khoisan show greater genetic divergence from the rest of the human race, indicating that as a population they have been relatively more isolated, for longer. This does not in any sense imply that they are in some way basal, such that it would be intelligible to call them older than other branches of the family tree.

This same objection applies to characterizing their languages in that way, we have no way of knowing if their languages are less or more prone to mutation than any other. We have rather less to work with, in fact, as the absence of literacy in their societies until modern times leaves us with no evidence at all. But it would be astonishing if their languages had no drift to them, and even "less drift" is a major and unsupportable claim, and these are the only ways in which it would be intelligible to say that those languages are older than another.

[beAbU]

Khoekhoe is one of the languages I referred to in my GP.

I've seen it written in ascii, is there an alternative alphabet?

[max_]

You haven't seen Amharic on Ethiopian Airline planes?

The project supports many other languages which justifies the use of "African".

[marci]

The issue might be in the "About" section:

"This application allows you to type most of the characters in the african language in any text field."

Maybe it should say "in AN african language", rather than "in THE african language".

[chungy]

Africa is a very very big place. :)

[pythonbrad]

Thanks for your feedback, i will take it in account.