UC Berkeley

In this dissertation, I argue that the digitization of the Bangla letter, khanda ta, tracks the transformation of the Western-oriented early consumer Internet into an open, global infrastructure that better met the needs of international, multilingual users longing for digital representation and equal affordances for communication. The story takes place primarily between 2000 and 2005, in South Asia and Silicon Valley, but ventures out in time and space to contextualize the events at hand. I follow the trajectories of standards-makers, software hobbyists, government officials, major software companies, and linguists in turn, showing what stakes and interests they held during this period, and how they shape the debate over khanda ta. The issue sits of khanda ta sits at the crux of several dichotomies that achieve a certain synthesis through its resolution: the gap between new open-channel internet governance institutions and traditional, closed-participation forms of governance; the opposition between the new entrants from the Global South and the mostly-Western actors who had designed the early Internet; and the tension between socially-meaningful language conventions and machine-readable technical standards.

Khanda ta’s eventual inclusion, or “encoding”, in the Unicode Standard represents the victory of the open-governance model of new industry consortia such as the Unicode Consortium, in which older authorities such as government ministries and international treaty organizations must fit themselves. It also represents a recognition of the values and expertise of the Global South, embodied by the South Asian experts in this debate, amongst those of the Western technical elite designing critical digital infrastructures. And it highlights the role of intermediaries who must accumulate both technical and linguistic expertise to build technical tools and standards for language. In the end, my goal is to show the multitudinous threads that came together to build a multilingual internet.