import ctypes import sys fontconfig = ctypes.CDLL("libfontconfig.so.1") fontconfig.FcLangNormalize.argtypes = [ctypes.c_char_p] fontconfig.FcLangNormalize.restype = ctypes.c_char_p print(fontconfig.FcLangNormalize(sys.argv[1].encode('utf-8')).decode('utf-8'))