Macrons in txt: ÄäÉé1ìÖöÜü

Of course, when you're txtng, spelling may not be so important, and you're probably as happy writing "tena koe!" as "Tēnā koe!" and you can use vowel doubling when it seems important. But read on if you want to indicate macronised vowels - if "Raapa" and "Raaapa" are unacceptable alternatives to "Rāapa" for you.

Support for different characters varies with phones and telecommunications providers. The following information about Vodafone and Telecom is possibly incorrect, being based on a small sample size. If you have more up to date information, please email feedback@kupu.maori.nz.

Ideally, phones and telecommunications providers would all use the Unicode character set and then we could txt characters in just about any language. (Of course the keypad to character mappings also need to be specific to the language you want to txt in!) However, not everyone has a unicode capable handset to receive your messages, so you can't rely on it in the near future, no matter how new your phone is. It even seems difficult to find out if your handset is unicode capable. For now, let's ignore Unicode for mobile phones.

GSM networks - Vodafone's 021

The Vodafone network and the handsets that work with it use the GSM character set, a small set of characters that lets you text in many European languages. Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori tell us we can use umlauts (e.g., äëïöü) in the absence of macrons. Unfortunately the ë and ï don't exist in the GSM character set, but we can use é and ì. For the uppercase letters we can use the same, except for the I: no accented I exists in the GSM character set. For this, the only reasonably easily typed character would seem to be the number 1.

So for the Vodafone network, we suggest using the following characters for macronised vowels: ÄäÉé1ìÖöÜü. Alternatively, you might like all the lower case ones to look the same; in this case, use ÄàÉè1ìÖòÜù. There is no perfect solution here, and given the informality of txt, taking the time to indicate a macronised vowel at all should endear you to your readers.

The Telecom network - 025 and 027

The Telecom network does not yet seem to support accented vowels. If you try to send a txt from a Vodafone mobile to a Telecom mobile, accented vowels seem to be replaced with tildas or question marks.