The major language of Nepal, known today as Nepali, is spoken as mother tongue by nearly half the population, and as a second language by nearly all of the rest. A considerable volume of computational linguistics work has been done on Nepali, both in research establishments and commercial organizations. However there are another 94 languages indigenous to the country, and the situation for these is not good. In order to apply computational linguistics methods to a language it must first be represented in the computer, but most of the languages of Nepal have no written tradition, let alone any support by computers. It is the written form that is needed for full computational processes, and it is here that we encounter barriers or at best inappropriate compromises. We will look at the situation in Nepal, ignoring the 17 cross-border languages where the major speaker population lies outside Nepal. We are left with only three languages with written traditions: Nepali which is well served, Newari with over 1000 years of written tradition but which so far has been frustrated in attempts to encode its writing, and Limbu which does have its writing encoded though with defects.