Published by: World Tibet Network News Monday - October 15, 1997

BEIJING, Oct 13 (AFP) - China has given Tibetans access to the information superhighway by developing the first computer code to be able to transcribe their language, the Xinhua news agency reported on Monday.

The Tibet Autonomous Region authorities have developed a code to read Tibetan which is said to be compatible with Unicode, a system which enables personal computers to communicate on the Windows 95 and NT platforms whatever the language.

"The code will help protect local culture and promote economic and social progress in the Tibet Autonomous Region, and enable massive development of Tibetan software," a Tibetan official in charge of the code's production was quoted as saying.

Tibet's exiled opposition, led by spiritual leader Dalai Lama, accuses Beijing of wanting to destroy the Tibetan way of life and impose Chinese culture on the Himalayan country.

Almost 95 percent of Tibet's 2.39 million inhabitants speak only in

Tibetan, with other speakers of the language living in southwestern and

western provinces of China and South Asia, Xinhua said.

"The code includes all the characters of modern Tibetan and 168 characters of ancient Tibetan frequently used," according to the agency.

"Tibetan is also the first language of minority Chinese that has been encoded according to international standards."

The Tibet University has started research on a Tibetan system to run on the widely-used MS-DOS platform which is to be completed in the next one or two years, Xinhua added.