Script Encoding and Cultural Identity: Navigating Digital Exclusion

By Maroua Bezzaoui, SILICON Intern

During the summer of 2024, Unicode’s internship program included interns from Stanford University, Northeastern University, and Google’s Summer of Code. Several of the interns have shared their experiences. The second featured piece is from Maroua Bezzaoui at Stanford University.

ICU 76 Released

Unicode® ICU 76 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 76 updates to Unicode 16 (blog), including new characters and scripts, emoji, collation & IDNA changes, and corresponding APIs and implementations. It also updates to CLDR 46 (beta blog) locale data with new locales, significant updates to existing locales, and various additions and corrections. For example, the CLDR and Unicode default sort orders are now very nearly the same.

Most of the java.time (Temporal) types can now be formatted directly using the existing ICU4J date/time formatting classes.

There are some new APIs to make ICU easier to use with modern C++ and Java patterns. Most of the C/C++ APIs added for this purpose are implemented as C++ header-only APIs, and usable on top of binary stable C APIs, which is a first for ICU.

The Java and C++ technology preview implementations of the (also in tech preview) CLDR MessageFormat 2.0 specification have been updated to match recent changes.

ICU 76 and CLDR 46 are major releases, including a new version of Unicode and major locale data improvements.

For details, please see
https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/download/76.html.

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Adopt a Character and Support Unicode’s Mission

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Or maybe something to treat yourself?
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Adopt a character or emoji to give it the attention it deserves, while also supporting Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their own languages across all devices.

Each adoption includes a digital badge and certificate that you can proudly display!

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You can also donate funds or gift stock

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 46 available

Unicode CLDR 46 is now available and has been integrated into version 76 of ICU.

The most significant data changes in this release were: 

• Updated to Unicode 16.0 (including major changes to collation)
• Substantial additions and modifications of Emoji search keyword data
• ‘Upleveling’ the locale coverage (see below)

The most significant changes in the specification were:

• Updates to Message Format in tech preview
• Updates to conformance
• New tech preview section on semantic skeletons

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 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. 

In version 46, the following levels were reached:

New / Upleveled Locales

±	New Level	Locales
📈	Modern	Nigerian Pidgin, Tigrinya
📈	Moderate	Akan, Baluchi (Latin), Kangri, Tajik, Tatar, Wolof
📈	Basic	Ewe, Ga, Kinyarwanda, Konkani (Latin), Northern Sotho, Oromo, Sichuan Yi, Southern Sotho, Tswana
📉	Basic*	Chuvash, Anii

We are currently planning for CLDR 47 to be a closed release with no data submission period. The focus will be on improving the Survey Tool used for data submission, making necessary infrastructure changes, and some high priority data quality fixes.

For more information

See the CLDR 46 release page , which has information on accessing the data, reviewing charts of the changes, and — importantly — Migration issues.

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Adopt a Character and Support Unicode’s Mission

Looking to give that special someone a special something?
Or maybe something to treat yourself?
🕉️💗🏎️🐨🔥🚀爱₿♜🍀

Adopt a character or emoji to give it the attention it deserves, while also supporting Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their own languages across all devices.

Each adoption includes a digital badge and certificate that you can proudly display!

Have fun and support a good cause

You can also donate funds or gift stock

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.

Time and Trust

By Samuel Minev-Benzecry, SILICON Intern

During the summer of 2024, Unicode’s internship program included interns from Stanford University, Northeastern University, and Google’s Summer of Code. Several of the interns have shared their experiences. The first featured piece is from Samuel Minev-Benzecry at Stanford University.