This chapter describes the basic elements of languages and their impact on software development.
This chapter deals with natural languages. Here a natural language refers to the spoken and written forms of languages. The S60 language portfolio is extending constantly with over 40 base languages included at the time of the writing.
It is common to confuse language and writing system. Writing system is something that is used to represent a language (or languages) in written form. For a discussion on writing system, and its impact on implementation, see the chapter About different writing systems. There are a number of languages that can be written with more than one writing system; for instance, the Japanese language is written using four different scripts that form the Japanese writing system. The four scripts are hiragana, katakana, kanji, and romaji. Each script answers different needs when writing Japanese. They are used for different purposes to present the Japanese language. On the other hand, for example Serbian can be written using either Latin or Cyrillic script, but they are not used simultaneously - the writer decides which one to use. In some cases, the choice of a writing system can be a political statement.
The chapter About different writing systems covers the topic of writing systems in more detail. The differences between language and writing system can be confusing, but in this document language refers to spoken and written language, while writing system refers to the script used for writing different languages.