LibreOffice 4.4 Language Support

General Language Support

Running down the languages listed in ">Tools >Options >Language Settings >Languages >Default Languages":

Western

• [None];
• Afrikaans (Namibia);
• Afrikaans (South Africa);
• Aka (Congo);
• Akan;
• Aragonese;
• Armenian;
• Asturian;
• Azerbaijani (Latin);
• Bambara;
• Basque;
• Beemba
• Bekwel;
• Belarusian;
• Bosnian;
• Breton;
• Bulgarian;
• Catalan;
• Catalan (Valencian);
• Chuvash;
• Croatian;
• Czech;
• Danish;
• Dibole;
• Doondo;
• Dutch (Belgium);
• Dutch (Netherlands);
• English: Sixteen locales are available;
• Erzya;
• Esperanto;
• Estonian;
• Éwé;
• Faroese;
• Finnish;
• French: Fourteen locales are available;
• Frisian;
• Friulian;
• Gaelic (Scotland);
• Galician;
• Ganda;
• Gascon;
• Georgian;
• German: Six locales are available;
• Greek;
• Guaraní, Paraguayan;
• Haitian;
• Hausa (Ghana);
• Hawaiian;
• Hiligaynon;
• Hungarian;
• Icelandic;
• Indonesian;
• Interlingua;
• Irish;
• Italian (Italy);
• Italian (Switzerland);
• Kaamba;
• Kabyle Latin;
• Kalaallisut;
• Kazakh;
• Kinyarwanda (Rwanda);
• Kirghiz;
• Kituba;
• Koonga (Congo);
• Kunyi;
• Kurdish, Northern (Turkey);
• Ladin;
• Lari;
• Latgalian;
• Latin;
• Latvinian;
• Lengo;
• Lingala;
• Lithuanian;
• Lojban;
• Low German;
• Luxembourgish;
• Macedonian;
• Malagasy, Plateau;
• Malay (Malaysia);
• Maltese;
• Mbochi;
• Mongolian (Cyrillic);
• Moore;
• Ndebele, South;
• Ngugwel;
• Niyem (Congo);
• Northern Sotho;
• Norwegian, Bokmål;
• Norwegian, Nynorsk;
• Occitan;
• Oromo;
• Papiamento (Bonaire);
• Papiamento (Curaçao);
• Pitjantjatjara;
• Polish;
• Portuguese (Angola);
• Portuguese (Brazil);
• Portuguese (Portugal);
• Puinave;
• Puna;
• Romanian (Romania);
• Russian;
• Ruysan (Slovakia);
• Sango;
• Sardinian;
• Serbian Cyrillic (Montenegro);
• Serbian Cyrillic (Serbia);
• Shuswap;
• Sidama;
• Slovak;
• Slovenian;
• Somali;
• Sorbian, Upper;
• Southern Sutho;
• Spanish: Nineteen locales are available;
• Suundi;
• Swahili (Tanzania);
• Swazi;
• Swedish (Finland);
• Swedish (Sweden);
• Tajik;
• Tatar;
• Teke-Eboo;
• Teke-Ibali;
• Teke-Kukuya;
• Teke-Tyee;
• Tigrigna (Eritrea);
• Tok Pisin;
• Tsaangi;
• Tsonga;
• Tswana (South Africa);
• Turkish;
• Turkeman;
• Ukrainian;
• Uzbek Latin;
• Venda;
• Vietnamese;
• Vili;
• Walloon;
• Welsh;
• Xhosa;
• Yaka;
• Yombe (Congo);
• Zulu;

Asian:

This should be renamed CJKV.

• [None];
• Chinese (Hong Kong);
• Chinese (Macau);
• Chinese (Singapore);
• Chinese (Simple);
• Chinese (Traditional);
• Japanese;
• Korean (ROK);

For those who have the ability, and desire to compile their own version of LibreOffice, third party patches for the following are available:

• Korean (DPRK);
• toki pona (Korean);

Japanese support explicitly includes:

• 片仮名 /  Katakana;
• 平仮名 /  Hiragana;
• 漢字 / Kanji;

and implicitly includes:

• 変体仮名 / Hentaigana;
• Rōmaji;

Ruby Presentation Markup Styles are used for furigana.

Currently,  chữ Nho is not supported as a primary writing system. The workaround is to use a Chinese (something) that one does not usually use.

CTL:

Technically this should be broken into three groups:

BiDi Writing Systems:

• Arabic: Eight Locales are available; 
• Hebrew;
• Persian;
• Yiddish

For Chaldean, and other ancient BiDi writing systems, the workaround is to use an Arabic variant that one does not usually use.

Indus Valley Writing Systems:

• Bengali (Bangladesh);
• Bengali (India);
• Burmese;
• Hindi;
• Dzongkha;
• Gujurati;
• Kannada;
• Khmer;
• Lao;
• Limbu;
• Maithili;
• Malayalam;
• Marathi;
• Nepali (Nepal);
• Odia;
• Punjabi;
• Tamil;
• Teluga;
• Thai;
• Tibetan (India);
• Tibetan (China);
• Urdu (Pakistan);
• Ugyghur;

Other Writing Systems:

• [None];
• Amharic;

In looking at these breakdowns, I keep thinking that it would be much simpler to have three selections:

• Language;
• Writing System;
• Locale;

One side effect of doing so, is that it makes proof reading, copy editing, and other general editing functions much easier, when using Braille, Moon, on another A11Y orientated writing systems.

Whilst this requires enabling support for Asian, CTL, and Western writing systems by default, doing so is not a disservice, because writing English requires all three to be enabled, for the appropriate typographical glyphs to be correctly displayed, and printed.

Spell Checking

Spell checkers won't tell one when « A Capella » is being incorrectly spelled as « A Cappella », and vice-versa.  One "p" is Latin.  Two is Italian. One "p" is sacred works sung in a chapel or other religious sanctuary. Nonetheless, they are useful at detecting incorrectly spelled words.

Spell checkers are listed under the highest version of LibreOffice that they have been verified to function correctly.  Listings are in order of "Newest".
(http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center does not appear to offer the ability to sort by extension name.)

Browsing the Extensions, we find spell checkers available for the following languages:

LibreOffice 4.4

Five spell checkers:

• Upper Sorbian;
• Moore;
• Breton;
• Finnish;
• Danish;

LibreOffice 4.3

Six spell checkers:

•  Turkish;

LibreOffice 4.2

Eight spell checkers:

• Ancient Greek;
• English (New Zealand);

LibreOffice 4.1

Eight spell checkers:

• Serbian (Cyrillic and Latin);

LibreOffice 4.0

Fourteen spell checkers:

• Korean;
• Tok Pisin;
• Akan;
• Bosnian;
• Lithuanian;

LibreOffice 3.6

Fourteen spell checkers:

• Arabic;
• Catalan;

LibreOffice 3.5

Seventeen spell checkers:

• Vietnamese;
• Mongolian;
• Spanish;
• Portuguese (Portugal);

LibreOffice 3.4

Fifteen spell checkers, all of which are listed above.

LibreOffice 3.3

Sixteen spell checkers:

• Lower Sorbian;

Updated Spell checkers
Spell checkers that are not updated, are spell checkers that contain incorrectly spelled words, and omit common words.

For the first dozen or so iterations of the Afrikaans spell checker, the words « die », and « ʼn » were omitted. Translated into English, that is « the » and « a ».

The first two or three iterations of the English (South Africa) spell checker include « color », whereas the correct spelling is « colour ».

The site claims twenty-one projects have updated dictionaries, but only the following are listed:

• Akan;
• Ancient Greek;
• Arabic;
• Bosnian;
• Breton;
• Danish;
• English (New Zealand);
• Finnish;
• Korean;
• Lithuanian;
• Mongolian;
• Moore;
• Portuguese (Portugal);
• Serbian (Cyrillic and Latin);
• Spanish;
• Tok Pisin;
• Turkish;
• Upper Sorbian;
• Valencian Catalan;
• Vietnamese;

Available spell checkers
Seventy-nine are listed on the extension page. I've listed them them from oldest to newest. Some of these have been updated a number of times.

• Akan;
• Albanian;
• Ancient Greek;
• Arabic;
• Aragonese;
• Asturian;
• Belarusian;
• Bosnian;
• Breton;
• Bulgarian;
• Danish;
• English (New Zealand);
• English (South Africa);
• English (US)(April 2011 List);
• Faroese;
• Finnish;
• French;
• Gaelic (Scottish);
• Galego;
• German (de-AT iGerman98);
• German (de-AT);
• German (de-CH iGerman98);
• German (de-CH);
• German (de-DE 1901);
• German (de-DE Frami);
• German (de-DE iGerman98);
• Haitian Creole;
• Hebrew;
• Icelandic;
• Indonesian;
• Irish;
• Italian & Latin;
• Italian;
• Kashubian: This one states outright that it is no longer maintained;
• Khmer;
• Kichwa (Ecuador);
• Korean;
• Latgalian;
• Latin; 
• Latvian;
• Lithuanian;
• Lower Sorbian;
• Luxembourgish;
• Malagasy;
• Marathi;
• Marshallese;
• Mongolian;
• Moore;
• Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk);
• Portugal (Portuguese);
• Portuguese (Brazil);
• Portuguese (Portugal);
• Russian;
• Serbian (Cyrillic & Latin);
• Shona (Zimbabwe);
• Slovenian;
• Spanish (Venezuela);
• Spanish;
• Swahili;
• Swedish (Synlex);
• Swedish Hyphenation;
• Tamil;
• Tibetan;
• Tok Pisin;
• Turkish;
• Ukrainian;
• Upper Sorbian;
• Valencian Catalan;
• Vietnamese;
• Yiddish;

Linguist can be abused to create a frequency list of all words used in a document. For proof reading, this is an easy way to avoid the "glazed over eyes" that results from creating the document that one is proof reading. It won't catch words used out of context, but it will pick out « Smith », « Smithe »,« Smythe », and « Smyth ». One virtue of this tool, is that it does not need a spell checker in the appropriate language.  Indeed, it was originally created as a tool to ease the process of constructing dictionaries in languages that lack them.

Grammar Checking

Grammar checkers are not a substitute for The King's English, or other books that provide the rules of grammar of the language one uses. Their virtue is that they usually catch repeated words, and incorrectly used punctuation.

In addition to the built in grammar checking, one can install:

• Grammalecte: This is a commercially distributed checker for French;
• Lightproof Grammar Checker: This is for Russian;
• Corrector Gramatical CoGrOO: This is for Portuguese (Brazil);;
• After The Deadline: This is a web based grammar checker available for English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. It does not know the difference between American English grammar rules and British English grammar rules;
• Voikko: This is a spelling, hyphenation, and grammar checker for Finnish;
• Magyar mondatellenőrző: This grammar checker is based on Lightproof, and optimized for Hungarian;

The built-in grammar checker is Language Tool.

The Language Tool Project claims some support for the following languages:

• Asturian;
• Belarusian;
• Breton;
• Catalan (Catalan, Valencian);
• Chinese;
• Danish;
• Dutch;
• English (Australian, Canadian, GB, New Zealand, South African, US);
• Esperanto;
• French;
• Galician;
• German (Austria, Germany, Swiss);
• Greek;
• Icelandic;
• Italian;
• Japanese;
• Khmer;
• Lithuanian;
• Malayalam;
• Persian;
• Polish;
• Portuguese (Brazil, Portugal);
• Romanian;
• Russian;
• Slovak;
• Slovenian;
• Spanish;
• Swedish;
• Tagalog;
• Tamil;
• Ukrainian;

Most, but not all of those languages are listed in the notes on http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/languagetool.

For those for whom English is a second language, BetaGama, might be a useful tool. Not quite a grammar checker, but not quite a spell checker, what it does is look common errors made by non-native English users.

Other Tools

Punctuation, combining vowels, cantillation marks, and typographic adjustments are just some of the things that can be awkward to correctly place in text.

Change Encoding

B2U Convertor will ease the pain of converting between the various encodings used for Vietnamese to Unicode.

Change Writing System

OOoTranslit will convert Serbian between the Cyrillic and Latin writing systems. It can be used for other languages, but the results are not guaranteed to be accurate.

From the Apache Open Office Project, we have:

• Rupantar: Devangari to/from Latin Writing System;
• XlitHindi: Hindi to/from Latin Writing System;

I haven't yet tested these with LibO 4.4.

Punctuation

Correcteur terminologique fr: This helps one adjust the text to conform to the formal rules of French orthography and grammar.

The following are listed in the Extensions Directory, but nothing is downloadable:

• ChinesePunctuationTW;
• ChinesePunctuationCn;

RepublicOfChinaTaiwanChinesePunctuation Marks Toolbar: This is available for the Mac OS X operating system only.

ChinesePunctuation Marks Toolbar: This makes it easy to add Chinese punctuation in all locales.

Diacritic Marks, and the Like

AncientGreek: As the project home page says "Editing Ancient Greek text has always been a burden". This eases the pain of editing Ancient Greek. Whilst not designed for Koine Greek, it is adequate for that task, provided the resulting work product is purely for personal consumption.

Nakdan by Culmus: This enables one to easily place nikkud in the appropriate places. I'm waiting for somebody to release paragraph and character styles that have nikkud in one colour, cantillation marks in a second colour, and the letters in a third colour.

As best as I can determine, no extension provides similar support for harakāt.

Mathematics

DMaths: As the description says: The Universal toolbox for mathematical content.

TexMath: This provides LaTeX support for LibreOffice.