Published by: World Tibet Network News Thursday, October 16, 1997

(Ray ZHANG, Guochen WAN)

October 13, 1997 (China News Digest) -- For the first time, Tibetans in China will be able to access the Internet using their own language, AFP reported quoting Xinhua news agency. China's Tibet Autonomous Region authorities have developed a computer code to transcribe Tibetan. "The code will ... enable massive development of Tibetan software," a Tibetan official in charge of the code's production said. "The code includes all the characters of modern Tibetan and 168 characters of ancient Tibetan frequently used."

According to him, Tibetan is the first language of minority Chinese that has been encoded according to international standards, Unicode. Of Tibet's 2.39 million inhabitants, almost 95 percent speak only Tibetan.