Guwahati: After years of pursuit by the Assam government to allot a separate slot to the Assamese script in Unicode, the issue will be discussed at the meeting of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) working group II to be held in London from Monday.

The working group II, part of the joint technical committee of ISO, will discuss the feasibility of preparing a separate code chart for the Assamese script. If the group agrees, it will ensure a separate slot for the Assamese script in the US-based Unicode Consortium as the Unicode standard is synchronised with ISO encoding standards in most computers.

The presence of Bengali script in Unicode has been a hurdle in giving a separate slot to the Assamese one because of similarities of many characters in the two languages.

Shikhar Kumar Sarma, professor of the IT department, Gauhati University, is an expert member of working group II. He has been studying the issue since 2008 and representing the Assam government in its meetings with the Bureau of Indian Standards, the agency which dealt with separate script on behalf of the Indian government.

The development has come following the Assam government's proposal to the Centre on April 27 about the necessity of a separate slot for Assamese script in Unicode. Before sending the proposal, there had been a series of discussions between the Centre, Assam government and the concerned organisations. The Centre subsequently forwarded Assam's proposal to the ISO.

Sarma said it is a good opportunity to convince the members of the forum about the uniqueness of the Assamese script and its difference from Bengali. "We will have to convince them that although many characters of Assamese and Bengali are similar, they are two different languages with differences in their scripts, pronunciation and sentence structure," he said.

Sarma will leave for London on Sunday. The working group II meeting is held annually.