Unicode 15.1 Beta Review Open

The beta review period for Unicode 15.1 has started, and is open until July 4, 2023. The beta is intended primarily for review of character property data and changes to algorithm specifications (Unicode Standard Annexes).

Normally at this phase of a release, the character repertoire is considered stable and very unlikely to change. Also, the plan for Unicode 15.1 had been for a minor release with only a very limited set of new characters.

Recent developments have led to a tentative change in those plans, however.

China has a very urgent need for encoding of certain CJK ideographs used in public services databases. To accommodate this urgent need, the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) decided at its April 2023 meeting to encode 603 new characters in Unicode 15.1 as CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I. This new block is included in the delta charts for the Unicode 15.1 beta. However, inclusion of these characters in Unicode 15.1 is contingent on support for this addition from China, and on support for this addition in the corresponding ISO/IEC 10646 standard from ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 at their upcoming meeting in June. While support for the new block is anticipated, there is a small chance that minor changes to this repertoire will be made after the beta, or that UTC will pull this block entirely from the 15.1 release.

Several of the Unicode Standard Annexes have significant modifications and associated data changes for version 15.1. For example, UAX #14, Unicode Line Breaking Algorithm has significant enhancements to support line breaking at orthographic syllable boundaries in several South and Southeast Asian scripts. Also, in conjunction with the parallel development of a new standard, UTS #55, Unicode Source Code Handling (see Public Review Issue #474), there are significant revisions to UAX #31, Unicode Identifiers and Syntax that will provide better specifications and guidance related to security, and also improved guidance for applications that define identifier systems using Unicode.

While draft content for the beta has been published as of May 23rd, the work groups preparing updates to the content could continue to make changes to data or specs during the Beta review period. Any substantive changes for the beta will be frozen by June 5th.

Please review the documentation, adjust your code, test the data files, and report errors and other issues to the Unicode Consortium by July 4, 2023. The review period will only be for six weeks, so prompt feedback is appreciated. Feedback instructions are on the beta page.

See https://www.unicode.org/versions/beta-15.1.0.html for more information about testing and providing feedback on the 15.1.0 beta.

See https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.1.0/ for the current draft summary of Unicode Version 15.1.0.

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To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

LDML (UTS#35) Part 7: Keyboards

CLDR-TC has authorized a new Public Review Issue, #476, for a major revision of LDML (UTS#35) Part 7: Keyboards. CLDR-TC and CLDR Keyboard-SC would appreciate feedback on whether there are specific changes or enhancements that should be made in the proposed specification.

Today, every platform must independently evaluate, prioritize, and implement all new or updated keyboard layouts, leading to major inconsistencies and delays especially where digitally disadvantaged languages are concerned. Consequently, language communities and other keyboard authors must see their designs developed independently for every platform/operating system, resulting in unnecessary duplication of technical and organizational effort.

“Keyboard 3.0” is designed from the ground up to be usable as a solution to support both hardware and on-screen (touch) layouts for all platforms in a single source file for each language.

With Keyboard 3.0, leading members of the language communities will be able to submit their layout once to CLDR, and it will be available to all platforms as part of the latest version of CLDR, making adoption much easier for platforms. Platform vendors will not need to develop and maintain their own keyboard layout data, especially for languages that they don’t yet support.

This work contributes to the goals of the United Nations International Decade of Indigenous Languages by improving the path for Digitally Disadvantaged Language communities to develop platform support for their languages. Users should see improvements in consistency between platforms, as layouts can be shared.

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Support Unicode
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

UTC #175 Highlights

by Peter Constable, UTC Chair

We had another productive Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) meeting last week,hosted at Adobe headquarters in downtown San Jose, California. Here are some highlights from the meeting.

Unicode 15.1 Beta

UTC has authorized the Beta release for Unicode 15.1. There were various, relatively minor technical changes to be made based on feedback during the Alpha review period, plus one major change that I’ll describe below. The Beta is scheduled for release on May 23, for a six week public review period to end July 4. That closing date will provide time for working groups to review feedback and provide recommendations for the next UTC meeting July 25 – 27.

CJK Extension I & GB 18030

A major change for Unicode 15.1 that was decided on was to encode 603 characters in a new CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I block. (See L2/23-106.) This was part of long discussions about GB 18030-2022 and Amendment 1 of that standard which China is currently developing. China has an urgent need for these characters, and the draft of their amendment has them allocated in reserved code positions of Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646, which is not viable from the perspective of the international standards. So, UTC has taken initiative to have China's need accommodated in a standards-conforming manner.

There was discussion as to whether the new characters should be added to Unicode 15.1 or to Unicode 16.0: it was generally preferred to wait for 16.0, but 15.1 was tentatively chosen in case that makes a significant difference for China’s process.

UTC recommended the addition of CJK Extension I to the INCITS/CS&I committee (mirror for JTC 1/SC 2—also met last week) who agreed to recommend to SC 2 the addition of that block in Amendment 2 of ISO/IEC 10646. See L2/23-114 and L2/23-115 for more information.

Orthographic syllable support in UAX #14

Another significant addition for Unicode 15.1 is that UTC approved extending UAX #14 Unicode Line Breaking Algorithm to support breaking of various South and Southeast Asian scripts at orthographic syllable boundaries. The algorithm for this is based on a proposal from Norbert Lindenberg and others (see L2/22-086), with details for incorporation into UAX #14 provided by Robin Leroy (see L2/23-072). A prototype implementation had been created as a public review issue (see PRI #472), and feedback had been positive. This will be a very significant enhancement in Unicode 15.1 providing important improvements in support for several South and Southeast Asian scripts.

Unicode display in text terminals

A new UTC project was initiated at this meeting to develop specifications for supporting display of scripts that require complex shaping in text terminals. This was introduced with a presentation by Renzhi Li and Dustin Howett of Microsoft (see L2/23-107). Even though the majority of computing device usage today is via GUIs, text terminals are still used in many scenarios. Thus, there was considerable interest among UTC participants in this proposal. An ad-hoc working group, chaired by Dustin Howett, will be formed to develop specifications. If interested in participating, let me know and I’ll connect you with Dustin.

Full details on these and other outcomes will be provided in the draft minutes that will be available soon (as L2/23-076 in the document registry).

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To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

ICU4X 1.2: Now With Text Segmentation and More on Low-Resource Devices

By Shane Carr, Chair of the ICUX Subcommittee

Across the globe, people are coming online with smaller and more varied devices including smartphones, smart watches, and gadgets. An offshoot of the International Components for Unicode (ICU) Committee, the ICU4X Committee is responsible for enabling these next-generation devices to communicate with each other in thousands of languages. Written in Rust, ICU4X brings lightweight, modular, and secure internationalization libraries to low-resource devices and many programming languages.

Since our first big release in September 2022, the ICU4X team has been busy building additional features and infrastructure. Today, the team is excited to announce ICU4X 1.2, featuring the first stable release of the Segmenter component, more Unicode properties, property names, a technology preview of language and script display names, HarfBuzz bindings, CLDR 43, full compliance with the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (UAX #9), and many smaller features and improvements to the ICU4X components.

Text segmentation is the process of dividing strings into meaningful units, such as words, sentences, or grapheme clusters (characters). It is a fundamental task in a wide range of applications, including cursor movement, highlighting spans of text, evaluating text for spelling and grammatical correctness, information retrieval, and text layout.

ICU4X 1.2 supports the two standards Unicode Text Segmentation (UAX #29) for word, sentence, and grapheme cluster segmentation and Unicode Line Breaking Algorithm (UAX #14) for line segmentation.

Given ICU4X's focus on being lightweight for deployment in resource-constrained environments, the team focused on ways to reduce data size versus ICU4C. The highest-impact differences come from the use of runtime tailoring (reducing the number of rule tables) and machine learning models (eliminating the need for Southeast Asian word dictionaries). Overall, ICU4X data for segmentation is 20.1% smaller than the equivalent data in ICU4C, and 60.7% smaller for line break segmentation.

In addition to being smaller in size, ICU4X's line and word segmenters are 19.1% and 52.2% faster in non-complex scripts and 46.9% and 32.1% faster in Chinese than the equivalents in ICU4C, respectively.

The machine learning models in ICU4X are used for word and line breaking in Southeast Asian languages including Thai, Lao, Khmer, and Myanmar. The models use an LSTM, are trained on large datasets, and achieve high accuracy while retaining small model size. By leveraging modern computer architecture features such as SIMD, the team optimized the performance of the LSTM inference to be about 3× faster than the naive implementation. However, the dictionary model remains the fastest, about two orders of magnitude faster than the LSTM. ICU4X offers both types of models for clients to choose.

Another focus of ICU4X 1.2 has been to support your text layout stack. A text layout engine requires more than the scope of either ICU4C and ICU4X, but any layout engine requires at least two ICU features: line break segmentation and the ability to correctly order bidirectional text. ICU4X 1.2 supports the segmentation and bidirectional text needs of Skia’s SkParagraph and HarfBuzz.

Finally, ICU4X 1.2 brings a number of smaller features to other components. The experimental Display Names component now supports language and script display names, in addition to region display names; the Properties component supports converting UCD property and value enum discriminants to their long and short names, and vice-versa; and all components have been upgraded to support CLDR 43.

Read the full ICU4X 1.2 release notes and then the ICU4X tutorial to start using ICU4X in your project.

To learn more about the latest release, be sure to attend our ICU4X Virtual Open House this Wednesday, April 19th at 9am PT.

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Support Unicode
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

ICU 73 Released

Unicode® ICU 73 has just been released. ICU is the premier library for software internationalization, used by a wide array of companies and organizations to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode Standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR). ICU 73 updates to CLDR 43 locale data with various additions and corrections.

ICU 73 improves Japanese and Korean short-text line breaking, reduces C++ memory use in date formatting, and promotes the Java person name formatter from tech preview to draft.

ICU 73 and CLDR 43 are minor releases, mostly focused on bug fixes and small enhancements. (The fall CLDR/ICU releases will update to Unicode 15.1 which is planned for September.)

ICU 73 updates to the time zone data version 2023c (March 2023). Note that pre-1970 data for a number of time zones has been removed, as has been the case in the upstream tzdata release since 2021b.

For details, please see https://icu.unicode.org/download/73.

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Support Unicode
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

Unicode CLDR v43 released

CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages (dates, times, numbers, sort-order, etc.). For example, all major browsers and all modern mobile phones use CLDR for language support. (See Who uses CLDR?)

Via the online Survey Tool, contributors supply data for their languages — data that is widely used to support much of the world’s software. This data is also a factor in determining which languages are supported on mobile phones and computer operating systems.

It is important to review the Migration section for changes that might require action by implementations using CLDR directly or indirectly (eg, via ICU).

CLDR 43 is a limited-submission release, focusing on just a few areas:

1. Formatting Person Names
   • Completing the data for formatting person names, allowing it to advance out of “tech preview”. For more information on the benefits of this feature, see Background.
2. Locales
   • Adding substantially to the LikelySubtags data: This is used to find the likely writing system and country for a given language, used in normalizing locale identifiers and inheritance. The data has been contributed by SIL.
   • Inheritance: Adding components to parentLocales, and documenting the different inheritance for rgScope data, which inherits primarily by region.
3. Other data updates
   • In English, Türkiye is now the primary country name for the country code TR, and Turkey is available as an alternate. Other locales have been reviewed to see whether similar changes would be appropriate.
   • Name for the new timezone Ciudad Juárez.
4. Structure
   • Adding some structure and data needed for ICU4X & JavaScript, for calendar eras and parentLocales.
5. Collation & Searching
   • Treat various quote marks as equivalent at a Primary strength, also including Geresh and Gershayim.

To find out more about these and other changes, see the CLDR v43 release page.

Support Unicode
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

The Unicode CLDR v43 Beta is now available for integration testing

CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages (dates, times, numbers, sort-order, etc.). For example, all major browsers and all modern mobile phones use CLDR for language support. (See Who uses CLDR?)

Via the online Survey Tool, contributors supply data for their languages — data that is widely used to support much of the world’s software. This data is also a factor in determining which languages are supported on mobile phones and computer operating systems.

It is important to review the Migration section for changes that might require action by implementations using CLDR directly or indirectly (eg, via ICU), and the Specification changes, since those are new since the Alpha.

We appreciate feedback from both ICU and non-ICU consumers of CLDR data. (The Beta has already been integrated into the development version of ICU.) Feedback can be filed at CLDR Tickets. Any tickets should be filed as soon as possible, because the target release date is 2023 Apr 12, Wed.

CLDR 43 is a limited-submission release, focusing on just a few areas:

1. Formatting Person Names
   • Completing the data for formatting person names, allowing it to advance out of “tech preview”. For more information on the benefits of this feature, see Background.
2. Locales
   • Adding substantially to the LikelySubtags data: This is used to find the likely writing system and country for a given language, used in normalizing locale identifiers and inheritance. The data has been contributed by SIL
   • Inheritance: Adding components to parentLocales, and documenting the different inheritance for rgScope data, which inherits primarily by region
3. Other data updates
   • Alternate names for Turkey / Türkiye
   • Name for the new timezone Ciudad Juárez
4. Structure
   • Adding some structure and data needed for ICU4X & JavaScript, for calendar eras and parentLocales.
5. Collation & Searching
   • Treat various quote marks as equivalent at a Primary strength, also including Geresh and Gershayim.

To find out more about these and other changes, see the draft CLDR v43 release page, which has information on accessing the date, reviewing charts of the changes, and — importantly — Migration issues.

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Support Unicode
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

Remembering John H. Jenkins (井作恆)

The Unicode community is greatly saddened and affected by the recent and sudden loss of John H. Jenkins, a long-time colleague and friend. John was most recently the Vice-Chair of the Unicode CJK & Unihan Group. The vast majority of characters in the Unicode Standard are Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (aka Han) ideographs, which are historically used with a broader range of languages. These have been challenging characters to deal with in script encoding, because of significant regional drift over hundreds of years. As an expert in Han ideographs, John contributed a non-trivial amount of work and effort, sometimes needing to make difficult character encoding decisions for the benefit of the large user community.

Many people have worked with John and appreciated his substantial contributions. Here are some reflections from two people who worked with him most closely.

From Lee Collins:

I met John when he joined our team at Apple in 1991. He came from an internship in Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG), having graduated in math and ancient Greek at UC Berkeley. In addition to his technical skills, he could read, write and speak Cantonese. All in all, he was a perfect addition to the team, since one of our main tasks was completion of the first version of the Unicode standard, in particular the Unified Han character set. A key component was the database we had built to track all the different Han character encodings, beginning with Xerox, later adding Mac OS version of JIS, GB, Big5, and KSC, then the unified simplified and traditional mappings provided by Mr Zhang Zhoucai of China. The database was a Hypercard stack that ran on a version of Mac OS I cobbled together to allow Chinese, Japanese and Korean text to be edited and displayed simultaneously. John took over management of that system and database and began to learn the arcane art of Chinese character encoding. He also found time to write a Risk-like game based on the classical world. I don't remember the name of that game, but it was a nice diversion from work.

I had been the primary Unicode representative at the first meetings of international experts to refine what became the ISO 10646 Unified Repertoire and Ordering / Unicode V1.0. The group, initially known as the CJK-JRG (Chinese Japanese, Korean Joint Research Group) later became the current IRG. Hoping he would take over my work, I invited John to join one of the early meetings in Hong Kong, November 1991, and he later became the primary representative. John continued to contribute to the IRG and the Unihan database for the rest of his career.

We both joined the ill-fated Taligent effort, where we developed the internationalization classes that later became the foundation for ICU. Those designs were probably one of the few things of value that came out of Taligent. I left Taligent and went back to Apple. John came back sometime later after IBM took it over completely. I was manager of the team charged with developing Apple's first Unicode-based text library, which we called ATSUI (Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging). It was largely based on the model of text layout developed for Quickdraw GX. John was the engineer charged with developing the library. That role was not a good fit for John's talents, so he moved to the Typography group where he was responsible for the font tools Apple used to develop our Truetype fonts. My team also developed support for complex scripts like Hindi and Thai, so I often used John's tools to create fonts with the required layout tables.

I moved on to other areas of Apple, ceased to work directly with John, and eventually left Apple. But, since 2015 or so, I again became involved in the IRG as the representative for Vietnam. That allowed me to work with John once more in his various capacities on the Unicode Technical Committee, especially his responsibility for the Unihan database and participation in the IRG. I enjoyed being able to work with him again. Knowing the size and complexity of the work he did for Unicode, he will not be easily replaced.

While we had our differences on technical and work issues at times, he was always a kind and thoughtful person. The world is a lesser place without him.

John was much more familiar with Cantonese than Mandarin due to his missionary work in Hong Kong. I think John’s characters, 井作恆, satisfied two criteria: they are close to his name phonetically (zeng2 zok3 hang4) and look like an actual Chinese name. Purely phonetic transcriptions often use a limited set of characters that look obviously foreign. These don't.

From Ken Lunde:

Nothing brought more joy to John than attending IRG (Ideographic Research Group) meetings, particularly when they took place in Chinese-speaking regions, especially Hong Kong, which held a special place in John’s heart. For those who are unaware, the IRG is responsible for reviewing and preparing the thousands of characters in the growing number of CJK Unified Ideographs blocks, which comprise approximately one-third of the total number of characters in the Unicode Standard.

Fun fact: John and I had an unwritten and informal agreement that he would attend these one-week IRG meetings when they took place in Chinese-speaking regions, and I would attend those hosted elsewhere, in a quasi yin and yang relationship. This would completely explain why I have never attended an IRG meeting in a Chinese-speaking region. This relationship was also evident in John’s focus on all things Chinese and my focus on all things Japanese, though both of us performed sufficiently dangerous dabbling in the other language.

John and I began working much more closely together as a result of COVID-19, which necessitated the formation of the Unicode CJK & Unihan Group, with me serving as the Chair, and John serving as the Vice-Chair. This group, which was formed in early 2020, pre-digests proposals and public feedback, interacts with the IRG, and provides its recommendations to the UTC.

Please visit John’s obituary to read more about his extraordinary life, or to express condolences to John’s family:

https://www.larkinmortuary.com/obituary/view/john-howard-jenkins/

The Unicode CLDR v43 Alpha is now available for integration testing

CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages (dates, times, numbers, sort-order, etc.). For example, all major browsers and all modern mobile phones use CLDR for language support. (See Who uses CLDR?)

Via the online Survey Tool, contributors supply data for their languages — data that is widely used to support much of the world’s software. This data is also a factor in determining which languages are supported on mobile phones and computer operating systems.

The Alpha has already been integrated into the development version of ICU. We would especially appreciate feedback from non-ICU consumers of CLDR data and on Migration issues. Feedback can be filed at CLDR Tickets.

Alpha means that the main data and charts are available for review, but the specification, JSON data, and other components are not yet ready for review. Data may change if release-blocking bugs are found. The planned schedule is:

• 2023 Mar 15, Wed — public Beta (data)
• 2023 Mar 29, Wed — public Beta2 (data & spec)
• 2023 Apr 12, Wed — Release

CLDR 43 is a limited-submission release, focusing on just a few areas:

1. Formatting Person Names
   • Completing the data for formatting person names, allowing it to advance out of “tech preview”. For more information on the benefits of this feature, see Background.
2. Adding substantially to the LikelySubtags data
   • This is used to find the likely writing system and country for a given language, used in normalizing locale identifiers and inheritance.
     
   • The data has been contributed by SIL.
3. Other data updates
   • Alternate names for Turkey / Türkiye
   • Name for the new timezone Ciudad Juárez
4. Structure
   • Adding some structure and data needed for ICU4X & JavaScript, for calendar eras and parentLocales.
   • Cleanup of the inheritance structure in CLDR
5. Collation & Searching
   • Treat various quote marks as equivalent at a Primary strength, also including Geresh and Gershayim.

To find out more about these and other changes, see the draft CLDR v43 release page, which has information on accessing the date, reviewing charts of the changes, and — importantly — Migration issues.

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Support Unicode
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

Unicode 15.1 Alpha Review Opens for Feedback

The repertoire for Unicode 15.1 is now open for early review and comment. As a reminder, during alpha review the repertoire is reasonably mature and stable, but is not yet completely locked down. Discussion regarding whether certain characters should be removed from the repertoire for publication is welcome. Character names and code point assignments are reasonably firm, but suggestions for improvement may still be entertained.

This early review is provided so that reviewers may consider the character repertoire and data file issues prior to the start of beta review (currently scheduled to start in May 2023). Once beta review begins, the repertoire, code points, and character names will all be locked down, and no longer be subject to changes.

Notable Changes

Unicode 15.1 adds exactly five characters, for a total of 149,191 characters. The five new characters are Ideographic Description Characters that are used in Ideographic Description Sequences, which represent a mechanism to visually describe the structure of ideographs.

In addition, the code charts for the CJK Unified Ideographs, CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A, and CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B blocks now include representative glyphs and source references for nearly 24,000 KP-source ideographs. Furthermore, the format of the code charts for the CJK Unified Ideographs block was updated to accommodate KP-source ideographs through the addition of a seventh column.

Version 15.1 does not add new emoji characters, however, 118 new RGI emoji ZWJ sequences will be defined.

Feedback for the alpha review should be reported under PRI #473 using the Unicode contact form by April 4, 2023.

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Support Unicode
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

Announcing New Unicode Adopt-a-Character Site

The Adopt-a-Character program was launched in 2015. Since that time, AAC funds have supported Unicode's mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their own language. This includes preserving historical scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphics and providing better language support for digitally disadvantaged and under-resourced languages such as Hanifi Rohingya used in Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Now you can more easily adopt a character and show off your hobby or business, favorite sport, or love – while also supporting a good cause. You can also give the gift of a letter to someone in your life. The possibilities are endless – and each adoption helps Unicode’s goal to support the world’s languages.

All character adoptions are permanent. Adoption of a specific character at the limited gold and silver levels is on a first-come-first-served basis. All sponsors receive a digital badge and are recognized on Unicode’s website, Twitter feed, and Friends of Unicode Facebook page.

To start your adoption, visit our new page!

Unicode, Inc. is a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization and contributions may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax expert for details.

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New Unicode Consortium CEO

— Mark Davis, President & Unicode Cofounder


In January 1991 I became the first president of the Unicode Consortium, and in that position have presided over the board of directors since then. I’ve had the honor of occupying those roles for just over a gigasecond now, and it's time for a change.

Over time, it became apparent to me, the Consortium’s other officers, and the Board of Directors that our management model was no longer sufficient for what the organization had become over time, and what it needed to be in the future. So, we began to explore a new, more sustainable governance and management model. And an important part of that was succession planning

Among the first major steps in implementing this model was the hiring of Toral Cowieson as our first Executive Director and COO in 2021. Since then, Toral has helped professionalize the management of the Consortium. Working with the Board and the other Officers, Toral has also contributed to strengthening the Consortium’s governance.

The Board and I have also recognized that, as President, I have effectively occupied two distinct roles — CEO and CTO — and that these two different roles require the full attention of two different people. Accordingly, the Board has decided to split these two roles, formally creating the positions of CEO and CTO, while retiring the title of President.

And as its next step — I am delighted to announce — the Board has elected Toral Cowieson as CEO to replace me.

Toral has brought a wealth of experience in leadership across non-profits, corporations, and board service to Unicode. As executive director, she has connected with the people in the organization, provided thoughtful leadership, and instituted and guided changes in our operations and governance.

I’m not stepping off the stage completely. The Board has re-elected me as Chair of the Board, and elected me to the new position of CTO. I’ll also be continuing as chair of the CLDR technical committee as well as contributing to ICU and the UTC in focused areas.

The Unicode Consortium is the forum for companies, countries and other groups to work together on interoperable standards, code, and data — to support internationalizing software around the world. As a simple example, whenever you glance at the date on your cell phone, the text you see is Unicode characters, is formatted for your language according to CLDR language data (including for English), and uses ICU code libraries to make that all work.

As CTO, my main goal this year will be to work with the board, technical groups, and invited experts to continue maintaining and extending that foundation for so much of the world’s software, while formulating a strategy for meeting upcoming requirements and taking advantage of new technologies.

In addition, I am also pleased to announce some additional changes. I’ve worked extensively with each of these people, and have the fullest confidence that they will do great work in these new roles.

• Peter Constable is a Technical Vice President and the Chair of the UTC. Since 2003, Peter has worked for Microsoft on various projects related to Unicode, internationalization, text display and fonts. He became a Unicode technical director in 2008 and later served as Treasurer.

• Addison Phillips is the new Chair of the Message Formatting Working Group. Addison is also the chair of the W3C Internationalization Working Group and an active participant in the creation of internationalization standards such as Unicode. He and I are co-authors of IETF BCP 47, which is the standard for language and locale identifiers.

• Elango Cheran is the Vice-Chair of the recently formed Community Engagement team and an internationalization engineer at Google. He actively contributes to the ICU and ICU4X projects, and to the MessageFormat Working Group.

Additional information available here:
Unicode Executive Officers
Unicode Fellows, Staff and Support
Unicode Technical Committee Chairs
Unicode Organization Chart

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

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Support Unicode
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

What’s New in Emoji 15.1?

Doing more, with less

By: Jennifer Daniel, Chair of the Emoji Subcommittee



This past Fall, the Unicode Technical Committee announced the delay of Unicode 16.0. This wasn’t without precedent — COVID slowed down the release of Unicode 14.0 in 2020 and the world seemed to survive 😉. Subcommittees were well prepared and adjusted accordingly, discussing what this meant for their respective areas of expertise.

For the Emoji Subcommittee (ESC) — the group responsible for defining the rules, algorithms, and properties necessary to achieve interoperability between different platforms for those smiley faces that appear on your keyboard (Shout out 😁🥰🥹🤔🫣🫡😵‍💫!) — this delay presented an opportunity. Sure, we were so close to exhaling a sigh of relief (the intake period for Emoji 16.0 proposals had just completed). But upon learning we couldn’t ship any new codepoints until 2024 we turned our energy towards recommending new emoji based on existing ones. (These are called emoji ZWJ sequences. That's when a combination of multiple emoji display as a single emoji … like 👩 🏽 +🏭 = 🧑🏽‍🏭).

When Less is More

An incredibly powerful aspect of written language is that it consists of a finite number of characters that can "do it all". And yet, as the emoji ecosystem has matured over time our keyboards have ballooned and emoji categories are about to hit or have hit a level of saturation. Upon reflecting on how emoji are used, the ESC has entered a new era where the primary way for emoji to move forward is not merely to add more of them to the Unicode Standard. Instead, the ESC approves fewer and fewer emoji proposals every year.

But our work is not done. Not by a longshot. Language is fluid and doesn’t stand still. There is more to do! This “off-cycle” gives us a chance to address some long-standing major pain points using emoji. The first one that came to mind: skin-tone.

What is a family?

The encoding of multi-person multi-tone support has matured over the years; however, the implementation can seem random to the average person: While it’s true, all people emoji have toned options (with the exception of characters where you can’t see skin like 🤺) there are … misfits. Some two people emoji offer tone support ( 🧑🏻‍❤️‍🧑🏿) others do not ( 👯). A few non RGI emoji render with tone but with no affordance to change one of the two characters (For example, 🤼🏾‍♂).

And then … There is the suite of family emoji (👨‍👦👨‍👦‍👦👨‍👧👨‍👧‍👦👨‍👧‍👧👩‍👦👩‍👦‍👦👩‍👧👩‍👧‍👦👩‍👧‍👧 👨‍👨‍👦👨‍👨‍👦‍👦👨‍👨‍👧👨‍👨‍👧‍👦👨‍👨‍👧‍👧👩‍👩‍👦👩‍👩‍👦‍👦👩‍👩‍👧👩‍👩‍👧‍👦👩‍👩‍👧‍👧👨‍👩‍👦👨‍👩‍👦‍👦👨‍👩‍👧👨‍👩‍👧‍👦👨‍👩‍👧‍👧👪). These characters include two people, three people, sometimes four and none of them have any tone support (!). We seem to have a lot of family emoji and yet simultaneously not enough.

The 26 “family” emoji can be broken down into four groups:



Despite the Unicode Standard containing 26 “family” emoji, each one of these glyphs is overly prescriptive with regard to delivering on a visual representation of a family. The inclusion of many permutations of families was well intentioned. But we can’t list them all, and by listing some of the combinations, it calls attention to the ones that are excluded.

What even is a family? For some, family is the people you were raised with. Others have embraced friends as their chosen family. Some families have children, other families have pets. There are multi-generational families, mutli-racial families and of course many families are any combination of all of these characteristics and more.

Fortunately, we don’t need to add 7000 variants to your keyboards (even this would fall short of capturing the breadth of "family" as a concept). Instead we can juxtapose individual emoji together to capture a concept with some reasonable level of specificity — not too unlike arranging letters together to create words to convey concepts 😉



For emoji keyboards to advance in creating more intuitive and personalized experiences the Emoji Subcommittee is recommending a visual deprecation of the family emoji. This small set of emoji will be redesigned as part of a multi-phase effort to “complete the set” of toned variants for the remaining multi-person emoji. This of course begs the question: when there are as many families as there are people in the world, is there an effective way at conveying the concept of “family” without being overly prescriptive in defining what is and is not a family? Well, thankfully icons can do a lot of heavy lifting without requiring very much detail.

When is an emoji running for the police or getting chased by them?

Another area the ESC is actively exploring is how the semantics of emoji sequences can differ when writing directionality changes. Some emoji characters have semantics that encode implicit directionality but when the string is mirrored and their meaning may be unintentionally lost or changed.

Left to Right Emoji Sequence
Quickly running towards an “exciting” police chase


Right to Left Emoji Sequence
Running away from the coppers

What, if anything, can we do to aid in ensuring that messages are meaningfully translated be them tiny pictures or tiny letters? As part of 15.1 we’re proposing a small set of emoji with strong directionality — with an initial focus on people — to face the opposite direction. Soon you too can run towards or away from … excitement.

Emoji 15.1

Given that the intake cycle of emoji proposals for Unicode 16.0 ended last July, the Emoji Subcommittee has also decided to temporarily delay the intake of Unicode Version 17.0 proposals until April 2024. Fortunately, you won’t have to wait until then to get new emoji. Among the list of recommendations includes 578 characters (most of them the candidates described above to support directionality). The list also includes a few humble additions including a broken chain, a lime, a non-poisonous mushroom, a nodding and shaking face, and a phoenix bird. Each one of these leverages a unique valid ZWJ sequence of emoji so while they look like atomic characters made of a single codepoint they are composed of two or more codepoints.



Broken chain is the result of 🔗💥, with a variety of meanings, such as freedom, breaking a cycle, or perhaps a broken url ;-). Like the bi-directional emoji touched on above, nodding face and shaking face are the result of 🙂↔️and 🙂↕️ respectively. Oh, and of course there is a phoenix rising from the ashes (🐦🔥), a perfect metaphor to capture where we are today.

The Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) will review the required documents at its first meeting of 2023 in January – and if these candidates move forward, you can expect an update from the UTC later this Spring and Summer.

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