Convergence in spelling, and spell-checker for Romanized Bangla in computers and mobile phones

Methods for Romanizing Bangla, or writing Bangla with the English alphabet were proposed half a century ago, but never gained popularity. Today, a new type of Romanized Bangla has emerged in mobile phone SMS, email, chatrooms, social networking websites, etc. Mobile phone SMS are widely used by individual users, phone operators, advertisers, the government, etc. In this study, about 500 - 1500 high-impact Romanized Bangla messages sent to wide audiences over about 4 years, were studied. In 2011 about 50% of Romanized Bangla words had converged to common and uniform spellings. In this study, the convergence to uniform spellings was seen to have increased to about 75 % of the words. Extrapolating from these trends, over the next three years, the convergence may rise to 85-90 % of words. Romanized spellings were found to be brief, for ease of typing with hand-held devices. English words were being rapidly absorbed into the Bangla language. As spellings converge further towards uniformity in the next few years. Romanized Bangla will become even easier to read and write, The common spellings also make it easier for computer softwares to recognize and convert Romanized Bangla to Bangla script. While it may not be possible or advisable to alter the convergence in the spelling trends, it may be possible to exert some force on the convergence with a spellchecker. Favorable spelling trends would make the Romanization consistent with pronunciations in English, making Bangla language more readily accessible by speakers of English.