androidunicodesoutheast-asian-languages

Myanmar Language in Android


Quick question: Can I use the Myanmar Language in an Android App? I guess the bigger question here is about unicode in general but I don't know what to ask about that.


Solution

  • Language support comes in two stages:

    1. The device needs to be able to print the languages' characters. Android has full UTF-8 support. This means you can print Strings in any language on the screen. BUT: Not all characters supported by the system are included in the default fonts. E.g. Tamil fonts are available, Sinhalese fonts are not.

    2. Android official language support allows you to set the phones locale to whatever is available. The list of available locales is linked in the other answer. Being on that list means: the user can set the language of the app and the whole system. And you can have folders like res/values-de to show locale specific strings.

    To test 1., you just need to open the phone's browser and look one a website in that language. Check if the characters are shown or if you only see [] or just nothing.

    To test 2., you need to check the android source code or some official documentation.

    BUT, there is something in between:

    If you see the characters but it is still not an official locale you can do the following:

    Add resources for your language anyway: res/values-whatever and allow the user to choose the custom locale in the app's settings. If the user has chosen whatever you can set the locale in EVERY Activity before doing anything else.