Igbo is spoken in Eastern Nigeria, Cameroon and elsewhere.
Igbo is written in the Roman alphabet but includes dotted vowels, and so requires special font keyboard support separate from languages like Spanish and French.
The following fonts include characters for dotted vowels found in Igbo spelling.
If you are using a recent version of Microsoft Word (2003+), you can use the following ALT key plus a numeric code can be used to type a Latin character (accented letter or punctuation symbol) in any Windows application.
NOTE: If these codes do not work, you may need to use the Character Map utility.
| Vwl | ALT Code |
|---|---|
| Ị | ALT+7882 Capital I dot |
| ị | ALT+7883 Lower I Dot |
| Ọ | ALT+7884 Caiptal O Dot |
| ọ | ALT+7885 Lower O Dot |
| Ụ | ALT+7908 Capital U Dot |
| ụ | ALT+7909 Lower U Dot |
| Ṅ | ALT+7748 Lower N Dot |
| ṅ | ALT+7749 Upper N Dot |
A freeware keyboard utility for Igbo is available from Open Road. Read installation instructions for details.
Igbo support has also been expanded in Windows Vista.
Apple has provided additional keyboards which allow you to enter Old English characters via Unicode. If you are working with a Unicode aware application such as Microsoft Office 2004, Text Edit (free with OS X ), Dreamweaver or Netscape 7 Composer /Mozilla Composer you can one of several keyboards to input the characters.
For dotted vowels, you can switch to the Extended Roman keyboard (10.2) or the U.S. Extended keyboard (10.3) then use the following codes:
| ACCENT | SAMPLE | TEMPLATE |
|---|---|---|
| Dot Below | ọ,Ọ | Option+X, V |
| Dot Above | ṅ,Ṅ | Option+W, N |
For print work, there are also a number of freeware and shareware phonetics and classics fonts. You can check the Summer Institute for Linguistics Fonts in Cyberspace for more details.
For the Web, you can use the Unicode numeric codes listed below.
For print work, there are a number of freeware and shareware phonetics and classics fonts. You can check the Summer Institute for Linguistics Fonts in Cyberspace for more details.
For the Web, you can use the Unicode numeric codes listed below.
For dotted consonants, the following browsers have the most consistent results.
Internet Explorer for Windows may not display implosive consonants by default. Users who prefer Internet Explorer for Windows should set the Latin font to Arial Unicode MS or some other Unicode script with phonetic symbol support.
Internet Explorer for Macintosh does not support implosive consonant symbols.
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
See Using Encoding and Language Codes for more information on the meaning and implementation of these codes.
Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you wanted to type Ụwa, you would input Ụwa into the HTML code.
| Let | Entity Code |
|---|---|
| Ị | Ị Capital I dot |
| ị | ị Lower I dot |
| Ọ | Ọ Capital O Dot |
| ọ | ọ (lower) Lower O Dot |
| Ụ | Ụ Capital U Dot |
| ụ | ụ Lower U Dot |
| Ṅ | Ṅ Capital N Dot |
| ṅ | ṅ Lower N Dot |
Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. Some display errors may occur.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are metadata tags which indicate the language of a page, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
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