Support for Lingala

Lingala is a language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Congo Brazzaville by some 2 million people as a mother tongue and by many more people as a second language. There is a ln.Wikipedia for Lingala. This project is not doing well for various reasons.

Extended Latin script

Lingala uses the Latin script and some characters like the ɔ́ this character should take only one space. This is often not shown correctly and there are several browsers that prevent proper representation of Lingala. Essentially this is a problem with font support and browser support. It is also a show stopper for the development of this language.

Monospaced fonts

Research has shown that monospaced fonts do not have the support required for Lingala. Monospaced fonts are a problem for several browsers and operating systems. When people requested monospaced fonts for the Safari browser, the support for Lingala was one of the reasons why this change was reverted. It would be good for Firefox and Opera users when the edit screen was no longer in a monospaced font. Internet Explorer and Chrome have their own and different issues.

This solution is not a great solution. However, ignoring the reason why Lingala and other projects that require extended Latin script support is worse. So the proposal is to:

• Change the edit screen from monomspaced fonts to sans fonts.
• Work towards a proper solution so we know how to support languages like Lingala in MediaWiki.