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I have a grouped list of items sorted alphabetically. Groups are created from the first character of each item title.

All characters that not belongs to any alphabet are grouped into a unique group (things like 0, 1, @, . are grouped together into #).

Question(s):

  • How do you handle grouping in Cyrillic, Thaï, Indonesian, etc.?
  • How do you handle grouping in a list with Latin and non-Latin items?

This question is related to a GroupView in a Windows Store App (Windows 8), but can be applied to all kind of devices.

Edit: For reference, we have to support these languages/alphabets:

  • All Latin,
  • Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish,
  • Cyrillic,
  • Greek,
  • Arabian
  • Thai, Indonesian, Korean
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2 Answers 2

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When in a localized environment, the best thing you can do is to group according to the local alphabet. On my Windows Phone I use English language as localization even though my navive language is Swedish. This means the phone organize all other letters of my alphabet to the # just before a, b, c,...

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I would like the option to set my contacts grouping according to my Swedish alphabet maiking my friends visible where I expect them to be. Åsa, Ärling and Örjan today shows up under # - instead of in the end where we organize these letters in Swedish.

The Swedish alphabet ends with X, Y, Z, Å, Ä, Ö. And as a consequence the Cryllic alphabet would be grouped accordingly:

enter image description here

Latin and non-Latin order of items

As for Latin and non-Latin items could be tough. It really depends on which non-Latin items you have, and should be treated with care. A general rule could be to use the Wikipedia help page on Alphabetic order when appropriate. At least it gives you a clue how they could be organized.

!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[]^_' abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ ¡¢£¤¥¦§¨©ª«­®¯°±²³´µ•¸¹º»¼½¾¿ ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿ ĀāĂ㥹ĆćĈĉĊċČčĎďĐđĒēĔĕĖėĘęĚěĜĝĞğĠġĢģĤĥĦħĨĩĪīĬĭĮįİıIJijĴĵĶķĸĹĺĻļĽľĿŀŁłŃńŅņŇňʼnŊŋ ŌōŎŏŐőŒœŔŕŖŗŘřŚśŜŝŞşŠšŢţŤťŦŧŨũŪūŬŭŮůŰűŲųŴŵŶŷŸŹźŻżŽžſ ǺǻǼǽǾǿ΄΅Ά·ΈΉΊΌΎΏΐ ΑΒΓΔΕΖΗΘΙΚΛΜΝΞΟΠΡΣΤΥΦΧΨΩΪΫάέήίΰ αβγδεζηθικλμνξοπρςστυφχψωϊϋόύώ

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  • Hi @benny-skogberg , thanks for your detailed answer. Here are my comments : - If country/region AND the phone language is set to language/country couple with specific alphabet, the photo contacts lists is adapted to group with these conditions : "a-z" for the current alphabet, then international characteurs, then non "alphabetic characters", then latin a-z order. - How do you handle grouping with asian alphabets ? It seems a bit tricky compared to latin/greek alphabet
    – Christopher
    Commented Dec 19, 2012 at 13:57
  • @Christopher Asian languages is very different from our making of words through letters. I'm unfortunately not the one to tell you how to organize a chinese phone book, but I can guide you to this interesting Wikipedia article: Chinese caracter classification
    – Benny Skogberg
    Commented Dec 19, 2012 at 15:33
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Cyrillic are grouped the same way, using first character of the name. I do believe the same rules are applied to Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish. Not sure about Arabian and Thai though.

And concerning mixing several languages. I think the better way is to try to keep the languages separated: I mean, do not mix the characters of different languages!

As an example I've done a slightly modified iOS address book navigation scheme (original address book has no ability to show grouping for several languages unfortunately):

enter image description here

Or, alternatively, you may try to give users an ability to quickly switch between language groups (by swiping or by buttons, etc):

enter image description here

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