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What languages does Mac OSX support

I'am thinking about purchasing my first mac but need to know what languages it support.

The languages I use on a daily basis for my job are Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili, Persian, Icelandic, Kalaallisut which is also known as Greenlandic, Yoruba, Hausa, Dholuo, Zarma and Oromo. Does it support even half of them if not its a no go because I need to be able to use them at any time.

Other OS

Posted on May 20, 2009 3:57 PM

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4 replies

May 20, 2009 4:59 PM in response to Que2009

The languages I use on a daily basis for my job are Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili, Persian, Icelandic, Kalaallisut which is also known as Greenlandic, Yoruba, Hausa, Dholuo, Zarma and Oromo. Does it support even half of them if not its a no go because I need to be able to use them at any time.


OS X can support almost any language available in Unicode, but for some you might need to add a font or keyboard layout. See this page:

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/mlingos9.html#typing

Making custom keyboards is easy with Ukelele:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?siteid=nrsi&itemid=ukelele

PS For Yoruba and Hausa, see these notes:

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2007/02/typing-yoruba.html

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2007/02/typing-hausa.html

PSS Note that MS Word for Mac cannot do RTL scripts like Arabic/Hebrew/Persian.

May 20, 2009 5:29 PM in response to Que2009

Here goes:

1 Danish
2 German
3 English
4 Spanish
5 French
6 Italian
7 Dutch
8 Norwegian Bokmål
9 Polish
10 Portuguese
11 Portuguese (Brazil)
12 Finnish
13 Swedish
14 Russian
15 Korean
16 Japanese
17 Simplified Chinese
18 Traditional Chinese
19 Afrikaans
20 Australian E.
21 Aymara
22 Azerbaijani
23 Indonesian
24 Malayan
25 Bislama
26 Bosnian
27 Breton
28 British E.
29 Canadian E.
30 Catalan
31 Czech
32 Corsican
33 Welsh
34 German (Swiss)
35 Navajo
36 Estonian
37 Spanish (Spain)
38 Spanish (Latin America)
39 Esperanto
40 Basque
41 Tongan
42 Faroese
43 Canadian French
44 Swiss French
45 Irish Gaelic
46 Manx
47 Scotch Gaelic
48 Galician
49 Guarani
50 Croatian
51 Hawaiian
52 Ido
53 Zulu
54 Icelandic
55 Kalaallisut
56 Cornish
57 Kinyarwanda
58 Swahili
59 Haitian
60 Latin
61 Latvian
62 Luxembourgish
63 Lithuanian
64 Hungarian
65 Malagasy
66 Maltese
67 Maori
68 Neapolitan
69 Norwegian Nynorsk
70 Occitan
71 Uzbek (Latin)
72 Oromo
73 Austrian German
74 Quechua
75 Romanian
76 Rundi
77 Sami
78 Swiss German
79 Albanian
80 Sicilian
81 Slovak
82 Slovenian
83 Somali
84 Tagalog
85 Tatar (Latin)
86 Klingon
87 Turkish
88 Turkmen (Latin)
89 US English
90 Vietnamese
91 Flemish
92 Walloon
93 Greek
94 Azerbaijani Cyrillic
95 Byelorussian
96 Bulgarian
97 Kirgyz
98 Kazak
99 Macedonian
100 Mongolian
101 Serbian
102 Tatar
103 Tajik
104 Turkmen
105 Ukrainian
106 Uzbek
107 Georgian
108 Armenian
109 Yiddish
110 Hebrew
111 Urdu
112 Pashto
113 Arabic
114 Persian
115 Amharic
116 Konkani
117 Nepali
118 Marathi
119 Sanskrit
120 Hindi
121 Assamese
122 Bengali
123 Punjabi
124 Gujarati
125 Oriya
126 Tamil
127 Telugu
128 Kannada
129 Malayalam
130 Sinhalese
131 Thai
132 Lao
133 Tibetan
134 Dzongkha
135 Burmese
136 Khmer
137 Cherokee
138 Inuktitut

May 20, 2009 6:06 PM in response to PJB

While those languages do appear in System Preferences/International/Languages, OS X does not come with support for all of them. Support requires an appropriate font and a keyboard layout, so that you can read and type text. Examples of languages for which these are missing (and therefore must be found elsewhere, if they are available) include:

115 Amharic
121 Assamese
122 Bengali
125 Oriya
127 Telugu
128 Kannada
129 Malayalam
130 Sinhalese
132 Lao
135 Burmese
136 Khmer

OS X can also support various languages not on the list in System Preferences, such as Coptic, Syriac, Tifinagh, Sumerian, Akkadian, Ogham, Runic, Gothic, and Etruscan, as long as they have been encoded in Unicode and a font/keyboard has been installed.

What languages does Mac OSX support

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