With a view to promoting usage of Telugu on Internet by promoting Web-friendly fonts, Silicon Andhra, the US-based literary and cultural organisation, is hosting the three-day Telugu International Internet Conference in California.

Beginning September 28, the conference would use technical and linguistic issues related to developing Internet friendly Unicode fonts. Experts from all over the world, including from Unicode Consortium would take part in the meet.

Though some Telugu fonts were vogue, it needed more fonts to popularise the language among the Telugu-speaking netizens.

“We have taken membership in the consortium by paying Rs 7 lakh. The US meet would discuss ways to standardise various technical issues to prepare the Internet-friendly fonts,” Mr Ponnala Lakshmaiah, Minister for Information Technology, said.

Addressing a press conference here on Thursday, he said if Telugu content was popularised on the Web, it would trigger several job opportunities. “We have also set up an advisory committee drawing experts from literary and technical fields,” he said.

With over 100 million Telugus in the world, the language was the 14{+t}{+h} in the list of languages spoken widely in the world. “Yet, we are way behind languages that are spoken far less,” he said.

The Minister would lead a team from the State to the US conference.

Mr Anand Kuchibhotla, founder and Chairman of Silicon Andhra, said Tamils were way ahead in making their language Web friendly. “They already held 10 such international conferences. We made a beginning with the California conference. We are planning to make this an annual event,” he said.

“Learning Telugu should not be looked down. We should tell the world that learning Telugu would mean more job opportunities,” he said.

“Moreover, top Internet technology companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google are showing interest in Telugu content. We should tap this potential,” Mr Anand said.

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