Access to Technology for minorities - Cambodia's Cham minority GOES mobile

Besides Khmer, the national language of Cambodia, the country has several minorities who have and speak their own languages. The Cham, present in Cambodia and Vietnam, are a significant minority, and the only one to have its own traditional script to write its language.

As part of ongoing work to improve access to information for minority groups, the USAID-funded SPICE program has collaborated with the company BREOGAN to ensure that the Cham script can be used on more and more in computers, and has paid special attention to make it available in smart phones.

This development makes possible, for the first time, to start typing the old Cham texts and preserving them in digital form, to easily print books in Cham, to access websites in this language and to exchange information in Cham through social networks.

Through these actions USAID Cambodia hopes to help recover the use of this script, reversing the trend of writing Cham language in other scripts that are not able to express correctly the phonetics of the Cham language.

This Cham Keyboard is available on Play Store here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cham.keyboard

Photo: Some Cham elders see for the first time a phone in which Cham text is displayed.

Photo: OPEN INSTITUTE - Cham script and keyboard on Smart phone

This keyboard was developed under the USAID-funded SPICE program to support every version of the Android smart phone system. Typing in Cham language will no longer be a barrier for those who wish to use their local languagein Internet and in social networks. Samsung smart phone users can install the font (No need to root phone) by downloading the Cham_Font_Samsung.apk application from http://www.open.org.kh/km/node/570#attachments​ . And go to setting -> display -> fontstyle -> select Cham.

The font and keyboard are licensed under a LGPL open source license, allowing free use, copying and distribution.