ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 35 N 0749 DATE: 2005-01-31 ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 35 User Interfaces Secretariat: Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR) TITLE: Name-writing in Swedish Authorities' data processing - Background information SOURCE: Karl Ivar Larsson, Swedish Expert STATUS: FYI DATE: 2005-01-31 DISTRIBUTION: P and O members of JTC1/SC35 MEDIUM: E NO. OF PAGES: 16 Secretariat ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 35 – Nathalie Cappel-Souquet – 11 Avenue Francis de Pressensé 93571 St Denis La Plaine Cedex France Telephone: + 33 1 41 62 82 55; Facsimile: + 33 1 49 17 91 29 e-mail: [email protected] LWP Consulting R 04/2-1 Note: This document was handed out in the SC35 Stockholm meeting 2004-11-24. Contents 1 General background 3 2 Languages and writing systems 3 2.1 General aspects 3 2.2 Minority language issues 4 2.3 EU working languages 5 2.4 Writing systems 5 3 Character data processing 6 3.1 Fundamental requirements 6 3.2 Character representation 7 3.3 Standards for character representation 8 4 Computer keyboards 11 4.1 General characteristics 11 4.2 The "group" concept 11 4.3 Keyboard standards 12 4.4 Swedish keyboard situation 12 4.5 "Soft keyboards" 13 5 Proposed guidelines for representation of names 13 5.1 General principles 13 5.2 Character set: letters 13 5.3 Character set: non-alphabetic characters 14 5.4 Required character set 14 5.5 Character transliteration 14 References 16 2 © Copyright 2004 LWP Consulting 2004-09-30 LWP Consulting R 04/2-1 Name-writing in Swedish Authorities' data processing – Background information (Note: Since the contents of this document may be of interest in some Authorities' international contacts, it has been written in English.) 1 General background Electronic interchange of information between Public Authorities in Sweden is increas- ing in importance extremely rapidly, as is interchange between Authorities and citizens as well as companies. The Swedish Government has decided to promote the "24-hour Public Administration" concept, to provide continuous access to public information. Information interchange is however often made difficult by a lack of compatibility be- tween different Authorities' data processing and/or communication systems. A multi- tude of such systems exist in the marketplace, some conforming to formal standards, and others based on "proprietary" – i.e. company-specific – principles. The Govern- ment has therefore found it essential: "To decide on a minimum of binding rules and standards necessary for a well function- ing electronic communication within the public administration and with its customers and to provide a supporting set of basic functions as a common infrastructure for the communication and co-operation between the different public agencies." (Extract from speech by Gunnar Lund, Swedish Minister for International Economic Affairs and Financial Markets). The Ministry of Finance has appointed "Nämnden för elektronisk förvaltning" (The Swedish Board for electronic administration, e-nämnden) to initiate necessary work on guidelines, later to be turned into formal regulations. The Board started its work in January 2004, and has commissioned a number of specific tasks. One such task is to develop a set of guidelines to satisfy the needs in data processing for correctly representing names of individuals, companies and geographical places. With today's international situation – including the Swedish EU membership – this re- quires the handling of a set of letters vastly larger than was earlier needed. The Board has commissioned Statskontoret (The Swedish "Agency for Administrative Development" – to investigate the matter and propose guidelines to be referred for comments to Authorities and others concerned. Statskontoret, in turn, has commis- sioned part of this investigation to the company LWP Consulting. This document describes various factors of relevance in the matter, including: • An overview of languages and their writing systems • Factors relating to representation of letters and other characters in data processing • Proposed guidelines for the representation of names in Authorities' data processing 2 Languages and writing systems 2.1 General aspects A very large number of languages exist in the world, although the number is rapidly decreasing as languages spoken by small minorities become extinct. Considerably more than 3.000 languages could however probably still be identified, although some of them can be considered dialectal varieties of a common language. Many of these languages/dialects however lack an established writing system, and are therefore not candidates for commonplace data processing. The number of languages in the world 3 © Copyright 2004 LWP Consulting 2004-09-30 LWP Consulting R 04/2-1 used by a larger number of speakers and also possessing a writing system could be put at around 200. The number of characters needed to correctly write even this smaller number of lan- guages is extremely large. This is mainly because the writing systems of the three im- portant languages Chinese, Japanese and Korean use an "ideographic" system of writ- ing, with tens of thousands of characters. (The common term "ideographic" is used here loosely and not strictly correctly; also it should be noted that the indigenous Korean system Hangul is really syllabic, although used in a way necessitating data processing similar to the truly "ideographic" systems.) In comparison, the number of characters actually used in international exchanges of computerised information is small. Most such exchanges use the Latin, the Cyrillic or the Arabic script. Information originating from languages with other writing systems is then "transliterated" into one of these scripts (the term "transcription" is also used in the connection, but here only "transliteration" is used, without a strict definition). 2.2 Minority language issues 2.2.1 General factors One factor to be considered for the data processing of names is majority- vs. minority- language use. In most countries, public administrations permit writing of names only in the writing system of the "official" language, although this is often not clearly stated in national legislation. In Sweden, for instance, the law governing the taking of a new personal name (SFS 1982:1134) simply states that a surname cannot be accepted if its "composition, pronunciation or spelling" is "not suitable". This text is, naturally, not a very precise basis for interpretations in a specific case. The matter becomes even more complicated by the fact that some countries do not explicitly declare a "state" language. A survey of the matter in the case of Europe (see References) however concludes that: "Most European constitutions declare one or more languages as the state, national or official language. Generally these three terms are used with one and the same meaning, i.e. that the languages declared are those used by the authorities, particularly in legal connections." Out of the 47 states recognised by the Council of Europe (CoE) as European – i.e. being either CoE members or eligible for membership – 28 explicitly declare one or more state/national/official language(s) in their constitutions, and another two do it indirectly. However the remaining countries, amongst them all of the Scandinavian states, do not declare a state language. The matter of language minorities, and therefore also of their requirements on name- writing, is now becoming internationally recognised because of the CoE "European Charter for Regional or Minority languages" (CETS No. 148). This charter has at pres- ent (September 2004) been ratified by 17 CoE member states, including Sweden, and further signed – although not yet ratified – by another 13. 2.2.2 The Sami situation in Sweden Part of the Swedish ETS 148 ratification is an undertaking "to allow and/or encourage . the use or adoption, if necessary in conjunction with the name in the official language(s), of traditional and correct forms of place-names in regional or minority languages." and further "to allow the use or adoption of family names in the regional or minority languages, at the request of those concerned." 4 © Copyright 2004 LWP Consulting 2004-09-30 LWP Consulting R 04/2-1 These parts of the Swedish ratification apply to Sami, Finnish and Meänkieli (Tornedal Finnish), and are supported in legislations SFS 1999:1175 and 1176. While Finnish and Meänkieli are well-defined languages, "Sami" is somewhat unspecific, since several varieties exist, generally considered separate languages, with partly differing alphabets. In the absence of a clear specification, the Swedish legislation should be considered to apply to all Sami varieties. The data processing requirements of Sami have been specified in documents issued by the joint Finnish-Norwegian-Swedish Sami Parliamentary Council; see References. 2.3 EU working languages After the latest EU enlargement the number of official working languages in the union's institutions is 20. Irish Gaelic and the Luxembourg language Letzeburgesh – which is really a German dialect – were not requested as working languages; and Belgium, Austria and the EU-recognised part of Cyprus use the majority languages of other EU countries. At present two scripts are in use within EU, the Latin and the Greek. With the possible future entry of candidate country Bulgaria the Cyrillic script will also come into use. It should be noted however that the Swedish situation for personal names already makes handling of Cyrillic-script names necessary, on a very much larger scale than Greek-script ones. Also Turkish-origin names are important in Sweden. The EU working language situation therefore not really influences needed decisions on name-handling in Swedish Authorities. 2.4 Writing systems 2.4.1 Concept of characters and "glyphs" A problem emerging with the introduction of data processing was the need to differenti- ate between characters as "conceptual entities" and their corresponding rendering, i.e. their written, printed or screen-displayed representation. For such representation the term "glyph" is used.