Helen Plaisier. Picture by Pema Leyda Shangderpa

Gangtok, Jan. 15: The Lepcha script will be covered by Unicode soon. The development will boost efforts to preserve the knowledge base of Sikkim’s original inhabitants in the electronic age.

“Several people have been involved in writing a proposal to get the Lepcha script included in the Unicode Standard and recently the Unicode Consortium has accepted the proposal. The Lepcha script will be included in Unicode 5.1 to be released in March or April 2008,” said Helen Plaisier from Leiden University in the Netherlands.

The Dutch linguist has been researching the Lepcha language for a year. She has completed a preliminary database of Lepcha names of around 300 birds found in the Sikkim Himalayas.

Unicode is an international character-encoding system designed to support electronic interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of diverse languages of the modern and classical world.

“The acceptance of the Lepcha script in the Unicode Standard is of great importance for anyone who wishes to use the Lepcha script on a computer,” said Plaisier who is currently in the Netherlands, working on a Lepcha-English dictionary.

“Workable Lepcha fonts have been available for several years now, and have been used successfully in publications in the Lepcha language in the Kalimpong area for example,” Plaisier added.

Linguists and researchers from the world over have been stressing on the need for conserving and documenting the indigenous Lepcha language.

The Lepchas are nature-worshippers and it is often claimed that their language has names for all the birds, plants, butterflies, animals and other insects as well as the hills and rivers in their native habitat. This knowledge, which is mostly passed orally, is disappearing fast as the community grapples with modernity.

It is this vast but dying knowledge base that has been attracting researchers and academicians to Dzongu, the last bastion of Lepchas in the remote parts of North Sikkim, for conservation and documentation works.

The Unicode Standard assigns every character a unique number, ensuring the same representation of texts regardless of country, language, or operating system.