Jamshedpur, May 8: Keyboards of computers with Ol-Chiki alphabets on them is the latest buzz in innovation of Santhali language.

The Ol-Chiki script in Santhali was last week recognised by Unicode 5.1.0, which now ensures that the script stands on par with other registered languages worldwide as legible for computer operations.

Unicode 5.1.0 contains over 100,000 characters and provides significant additions and improvements that extend text processing for software worldwide.

A team of software engineers and experts in the tribal language are now busy developing a layout of the keyboard with Ol-Chiki, under an initiative of the ministry of communication and information technology, Union government.

“We are developing a Santhali language software tool, which would have some essential features, with a multi-font keyboard design being one highlight,” said Ganesh Murmu, a professor at the department of tribal and regional languages, Ranchi University.

Murmu is the lone expert on the language who is working on this prestigious project, the other person being a Santhali language expert who will help feed in Ol-Chiki data for development of the software.

Murmu is currently working at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Pune. He is part of the research team appointed by the Union government to do advanced research on the field.

Initially, it is restricted to development of the software in equivalent languages of Bangla, Oriya, Devanagari and Roman, which will later include a transliteration (representing letters or words in the characters of another alphabet or script) into other Indian languages, including Urdu, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada and the likes.

“Only those characters that have been approved in the unicode set will be used in designing the keyboard,” said Murmu.

Apart from the development of the multi-font keyboard, work in develo- ping corresponding software in a host of other langu- ages also features prominently in the list.

Matching of script along with correspondent design development will happen in the project now. Matching of script and a subsequent development of the keyboard will be the later feature of the ongoing research. Once designed, the keyboard will be distributed free to central government employees to get a feedback on the same before it hits the market.