Thanks, all, for filling in my poll last week – this was basically the word for "Brussels" in various different scripts, and I thought it would be interesting to see which are readable, and which less so, by various browsers. I arranged them in order of the number of people in the world who actually use the script in question.
There were five non-Latin scripts which everyone could see clearly:
ब्रुसेल्स – Devanagari (Hindi)
Брюссель – Cyrillic (Russian etc)
பிரசெல்சு – Tamil
บรัสเซลส์ – Thai
Βρυξέλλες – Greek
There were another five that all but one person could see clearly:
بروكسل – Arabic / Farsi
ব্রাসেল্স – Bengali
בריסל – Hebrew
Բրյուսել – Armenian
ბრიუსელი – Georgian
Another two South Asian scripts could be seen by all but two people who answered:
ബ്രസൽസ് – Malayalam
બ્રસેલ્સ – Gujarati
And then for five scripts which could be seen by 90 of the 93 respondents, we swing first east and then back south:
布鲁塞尔 – Chinese
ブリュッセル – Japanese
브뤼셀 – Korean
బ్రస్సెల్స్ – Telugu
ಬ್ರಸೆಲ್ಸ್ – Kannada
Three more were visible to over 80 of the 93 who replied:
ବୃସେଲ – Oriya/Odia (87/93)
බ්රසල්ස් – Sinhala (84/93)
པུའུ་ལུའུ་སེལ། – Tibetan (83/93)
It's not surprising, but it's a bit sad, that the Ge'ez script used for Amharic and Tigrinya in East Africa is so far down:
ብሩክሴል 76/93
It's not at all surprising that Aramaic is very close to the bottom:
ܒܪܘܟܣܠ 59/73
And it's an extraordinary demonstration of the international isolation of Burma / Myanmar that not even 30% of respondents could see the Burmese script for "Brussels", despite the fact that Burmese has more native speakers than, say, Amharic, Sinhalese, Greek, Armenian, Hebrew, Georgian, or indeed Dutch, Hungarian etc. Last time I did one of these polls, only one person in 97 could see the Burmese; it's improved a lot since then but still has a long way to go.
ဘရပ်ဆဲလ်မြို့ 26/73
Overall, I'd say that internationalisation is moving forward; there are a lot more people who can see a lot more languages in the original script, whether or not they can actually read them. It's gratifying to see that Devanagari, Tamil and Bengali have made gains, and Sinhalese in particular has leapt up the charts, though a bit surprising that Chinese and Japanese still are not right at the very top.
(I'm sorry to have missed Divehi, Khmer, and Inuit, Cherokee and Deseret this time; will do better next time.)