ASIAN ETHNICITY 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 19 Zaikwa, Law-waw, Lacheik, and Lisu, have their own written languages, but sometimes use Jingphaw for inter-tribal communication. Facebook Messenger is a messaging app and platform developed by Facebook. Simons and Fenning, Ethnologue. Respondents from the Ta'ang Literature and Culture Association remarked that Palaung is the name associated with and familiar among majority Bamar, but the name Ta'ang more appropriately represents the group and its sub-groups. The Ta'ang Literature and Culture Association is working to promote standardization of the Ta'ang language to create a common Ta'ang identity. In late 2018, the association obtained a consensus among different Ta'ang cultural sub-groups to identify the Ruchin language as a formal Ta'ang common language. However, local Ta'ang media continues to use Burmese on their platforms to reach out to a wider audience. Interviews with a female Ta'ang local leader from Ta'ang Literature and Culture Association, and one female Ta-6ang political leader were conducted on 2nd and 3 March 2021. Before the invention of Zawgyi and Unicode, most Myanmar users in internet chat rooms used the available Roman letters to write Myanmar sounds, known as Myanglish or Burglish. Zawgyi was introduced as an ad-hoc font encoding in 2006 for digital commu­ nication on the computers and smart phones in Myanmar. Zawgyi applies the visual typing and encoding method as one would write on paper, rather than using logical linguistics and computer encoding conventions. Some minority groups, particularly Shan, Mon, and Pa-O, also invented Zawgyi keyboards for their own languages. Unicode, on the other hand, offers consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems. The Myanmar (Burmese) script was added to the Unicode Standard in Version 3.0 in September 1999. Unicode was officially launched by Myanmar’s State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi only in October 2019. The Unicode system helps the inter­ nationalization of Myanmar scripts and language. Initially only the Burmese keyboard was widely available on cellphones. Gradually, input keyboards were designed for several other non-Burmese languages. See “Respect Myanmar’s Ethnic Diversity.” A male Shan respondent, aged 28. This statement also reveals a rapid shift from orality to literacy and a more literate generation among the Pa-O population, which is unrelated to the adoption of new digital communications technology in Myanmar. Ranzato, Recent advances in low-resource machine translation. The term ‘language resource’ refers to a set of speech or language data and descriptions in machine readable form, used for building, improving or evaluating natural language and speech algorithms or systems, or, as core resources for the software localization and language services industries, for language studies, electronic publishing, international transactions, subject-area specialists and end users. Only about 20 popular languages out of nearly 7,000 languages being used across the world are rich-resource languages. All others have limited resources and are considered to be low-resource languages. See note 51 above. Public groups on Facebook are those that are open to all Facebook users to join and share posts. Joining private Facebook groups requires permission from group administrators and only invited members can share posts on the group page. A male Naga respondent, aged 32. An attempt by the Kayah State government to place the General Aung San statue was interpreted by Kayah youth and civil society groups as a symbol of unfulfilled promise by the National League for Democracy (NLD) to grant meaningful rights and self-determination to ethnic minority groups. Three respondents who identified socially respectful persons as their leaders are a Mon, a Naga and a Danu.