Yann Forget wrote:
It's surprising that Bengali Wikipedia didn't
start yet. There are probably
more than 200 millions people speaking Bengali, although I don't how many
among these have Bengali as their monther tongue (190M according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language, 207M according to other
sources). And Bengali people have also a strong reputation for cultural
awareness, and the Bengali language has a long tradition of poetry and
literature.
Apparently Windows just got around to supporting Unicode Bengali with
their SP2 release this year (see
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/bengali.html). So I'd _guess_ the
Internet-using elite is still largely using a legacy encoding (assuming
Windows dominance in Bengali computing). I've certainly run into Indic
sites that render text with graphics files (as is still occasionally
done with Chinese characters).
Actually Minnan has the same issue: transitioning from legacy encoding
to Unicode. Community growth is to an extend limited by the will to
switch, i.e. how desperately people need Wikipedia ;)
Each of Assamese, Burmese, Gujarati, Kannada, Khmer,
Nepalese, Oriya, Panjabi,
Pashtu, Sindhi, and Telugu have more than 10 millions speakers. However most
of these speakers have a poor Internet connectivity at the best. So it just a
matter of time when Internet connections become easily available in these
parts of the world.
So it would seem that connectivity is necessary but insufficient for
accessing less-well supported/unsupported Unicode standards.