Standardization Supporting Cultural Diversity: Character Repertoires, Ordering and Assign- ment to the 12-key Telephone Keypad for European Languages and Languages Used in Europe

ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, has published a standard (ES 202 130) in 2003 that specifies the character repertoires and assignment of characters on the 12-key telephone keypad for a range of European languages. The standard for letters, digits and special characters (such as the Euro symbol and punctuation marks) covered the official languages of the EU and EFTA members, Russia, as well as countries with applicant status for the EU at that time. This paper describes the further development of the standard to cover other major languages spoken in Europe including official languages, minority languages and immigrants’ languages.