Karen keyboard layout
Karen languages have their own keyboard layout!
How do I get it?
I’m not quite there 😪️ but it won’t be long now.
The Karen languages keyboard is being added into xkb (for Linux and other Open Source systems) and keyman (for everybody else).
Why?
- The existing Burmese, Shan and Mon keyboards do not include all of the letters needed for the Karen languages.
- Sgaw Karen gets all of the love - the Pwo Karen languages need do be supported too.
- In 2025, if you can’t type your own language into a computer, you’re excluded not only from full digital participation in the world, you’re excluded from participation in the world, because the world has gone digital.
History
In the mists of digital time, before the turn of the millennium (1998 actually), I made my first crude attempts to map the rich orthography of the Sgaw Karen language onto the unforgiving grid of the computer keyboard. Myanmar had not yet been allocated a block in the Unicode specification and font technology that could handle complexity such as the wrap-around ‘ra’ (ြ) had not been invented. As a result, the Karen fonts I developed abused the Latin code area and used many characters that are redundant today.
An aeon later, I made an attempt to fix the worst abuses of the keyboard layout by writing software that would select the correct variant of letters such as wrap-around ‘ra’ (ြ), but this work was never completed.
My work entered cryostasis, occasionally illuminated by developments such as Unicode support for Myanmar languages and SIL’s Graphite technology.
Then in 2024 I had need to enter Eastern Pwo Karen into my computer. I discovered to my horror that all of the developments had not resulted in a keyboard layout for this language, and that Eastern Pwo Karen speakers were abusing the Burmese language to write a bastardised version of their language.
In 2025 created a keyboard layout to support Karen languages - Eastern Pwo, Sgaw, Western Pwo, and also Pa’O when I discovered it in the Unicode specification and realised that it required only 2 additional letters.