Soundex support for foreign languages

Question

Hi

We have an application we are developing that will run worldwide. When we are searching data for peoples names I would like to use Soundex but I am not sure it works effectivly for any language other than English. Does anyone know if it is effective in Dutch, German, French etc?

 

Answer 1

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=396726&SiteID=1

HTH

Answer 2

HTH

It doesn't. The link is broken

Answer 3

The regular soundex works pretty good for Hungarian:

-- Hungarian soundex test

SELECT SOUNDEX('Kovacs'),SOUNDEX('Kovats'),SOUNDEX('Kovach')
-- K120	K132	K120

SELECT SOUNDEX('Kovács'),SOUNDEX('Kováts'),SOUNDEX('Kovách')
-- K120	K132	K120

SELECT SOUNDEX('Széchenyi'),SOUNDEX('Szécsenyi'),SOUNDEX('Szécheni')
-- S250	S250	S250

SELECT SOUNDEX('Kossuth'),SOUNDEX('Koshuth'),SOUNDEX('Koshut')
-- K230	K230	K230

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Kalman Toth SQL SERVER 2012 & BI TRAINING
New Book: Beginner Database Design & SQL Programming Using Microsoft SQL Server 2012

Answer 4

Soundex was specifically designed to handle the English pronunciation of names (mostly those of Western European origin) and does not function particularly well outside of that use. Your mileage may vary and will probably be limited for some of the European languages and probably will not work at all for Asian languages or Arabic.

Below is a link that might be useful, especially the variants section, where you may be able to roll your own implementation in CLR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

Dave

Answer 5

The link provided in May, 2006, is not broken for me. When I follow it I get to this page:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/transactsql/thread/b37917af-60be-4689-a35c-fc9861582f38/

Does this help?

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Richard Mueller - MVP Directory Services

Answer 6

It is working now, but didn't work few hours ago. Perhaps it was fixed in the meantime.

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