We are very happy to inaugurate our Opinion column with this piece by Ali Eteraz on the casual censorship of Big Technology, and its effect on language and identity.

I’m a Bay Area based writer who has gotten fed up with the disregard that Google and Apple have shown to the languages of hundreds of millions of people, especially Persian, Punjabi, and Urdu. That is at least 200 million people, if not more.

Basically, Apple & Google both treat these languages as “Arabic.” Even though Urdu has twelve more letters than Arabic, Apple thinks that Urdu speakers can use the Arabic keyboard.

Imagine your foreign phone maker expecting you to write without a letter as ubiquitous as E.

That’s what Apple demands from Urdu and Punjabi speakers. As for Google, it’s imposing an Arabic Naskh Script on these languages, which have traditionally been written in a cursive cascading script called…