Collation in action

The easiest way to explain the inner workings of sorting is to show some examples of different linguistic collations applied to the same data.

A simple list of multilingual strings was created, and then English collation rules were applied. The results are shown below. (The numbers to the left are included so that when the data is re-ordered for different collations, as seen later in the document, differences will be easier to determine.) This particular set of words was arbitrarily chosen to help highlight some of the differences one can expect to see across a number of different collations.

1. English collation order
All accented linguistic characters sort with their base characters; diacritics affect the string from left to right.

2. Hindi vs. Marathi ordering
There are differences within Indic languages, specifically, Devanagari script and how sorting changes between two languages in this script: Hindi vs. Marathi. The Devanagari script is an example of yet another type of writing system, specifically, an alphasyllabary.