Recent Unicode Happenings: September 2026

Introducing the Davis Prize and Mark Davis Distinguished Lecture

To read, write, and connect digitally in one’s own language is not a “convenience.” It is a matter of dignity, opportunity, and inclusion.

The Mark Edward Davis Distinguished Lecture and The Davis Prize were created to advance that goal.

Named in honor of Unicode co-founder and Stanford alumnus Dr. Mark Edward Davis—one of the foundational architects of modern multilingual computing—the Lecture and Prize will recognize leaders at any career stage whose work expands digital participation across the world’s languages, scripts, and cultures.

The inaugural Mark Edward Davis Distinguished Lecturer and Davis Prize recipient will be selected in 2027, with the lecture taking place at Stanford University in December 2027.

Nominations open soon. Read the full press release here.

Thank you to Dr. Tom Mullaney and Audrey Gao at Stanford SILICON for their collaboration and leadership in making this recognition for Mark a reality.

Announcing the Unicode® Standard, Version 18.0

The Unicode Standard is the foundation for all digital communications — this major update introduces 13,007 new characters, including three new currency symbols, nine new emoji characters, historical scripts, and many other characters and symbols, bringing the total number of encoded characters to 172,808.

Learn more on the Unicode blog.

Unicode Technology Workshop 2026: Exciting Updates!

Full Program Now Available

Unicode Technology Workshop is coming soon, and this year’s full program is now available online! Upcoming sessions and tutorials will cover a wide range of topics including internationalization, digitally disadvantaged languages, keyboards, emoji, AI, digital humanities, and more. Hear from experts across the internationalization and localization, type design, and language industries worldwide.

If you interact with Unicode technologies, UTW is the event for you. Don't miss your chance to register for one of the world's premier internationalization events — special rates for students, academics, and Unicode members are available.

Registration is flexible, and participants can choose to attend 2 days of tutorials, 2 days of sessions, or all 4 days of UTW.

Tickets are available until Monday, October 12. Don’t miss your chance to register!

Scholarship Applications Now Open Through September 25

We are pleased to be able to sponsor a number of student scholarships for UTW 2026.

Partial scholarships are available to all currently-enrolled students at any level of schooling and early career researchers who have completed their degree within the last three years, and will only cover registration costs. Apply now!

About UTW 2026

Unicode Technology Workshop 2026 (UTW 2026) will take place from October 20-23, 2026 in historic and vibrant Nancy, France. This year’s event will be co-hosted by the Unicode Consortium alongside partners in the Missing Scripts Program, a collaboration among University of California, Berkeley’s Script Encoding Initiative (SEI), Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT), and Institut Designlabor Gutenberg (IDG).

We look forward to welcoming you to Nancy to build the future of internationalization and multilingual digital communication!

🔗 For the latest updates about UTW 2026, visit https://www.unicode.org/events/utw/2026/

We look forward to seeing you there!

Meet Lighthouse: Coming to Your Keyboard in 2027!

Officially welcoming Lighthouse (U+1F6D9) to The Unicode Standard —  just released in Unicode 18.0!

The Unicode Standard is continually evolving, and very character has a story: here’s what Lighthouse’s proposers had to say about this new emoji.

“Commonly symbolizes orientation, wisdom or guidance in difficult times (“a beacon in the dark”). Lighthouses represent navigation through life challenges, symbolizing the importance of making informed decisions and finding direction during uncertainty. They may also metaphorically represent mentors, friends, or inspirational figures who provide guidance and support.”

Lighthouse will be available for adoption in 2027 — in the meantime, adopt one of our other 156,933 available characters to support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their own languages across all devices.

About the Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is the premier 501(c)3 non-profit, open source, open standards body for the Internationalization of software and services. It is arguably the most widely deployed software in the world available across 20 billion devices and counting! At its core, Unicode enables people around the world to communicate in any language.

Your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

Announcing the Unicode® Standard, Version 18.0

Version 18.0 of the Unicode Standard is now available. The Unicode Standard is the foundation for all digital communications, and this new version supports a wider range of text encoding needs. This major update includes new characters and code charts, updated data files, and updated specifications that define many fundamental aspects of text processing.

This version adds 13,007 new characters, including nine new emoji characters as well as many other characters and symbols, bringing the total number of encoded characters to 172,808.

Among the most anticipated new characters are three new currency symbols:

• U+20C2 RUFIYAA SIGN
• U+20C3 UAE DIRHAM SIGN
• U+20C4 OMANI RIAL SIGN

Each of these symbols was authorized for public use by the respective monetary authority over a year ago, but usage has been hindered by lack of a standardized encoding. With the release of Unicode 18.0, vendors are now able to implement support for these symbols.

The largest set of new characters is for the historical Seal (or “Small Seal”) script. This set of 11,328 ideographic characters has important cultural significance in China, dating back to the Qin Dynasty (around 200 BCE). Another new cultural heritage script from China is Jurchen, used in northeastern China during the Jin Dynasty.

See the delta code charts for details on all the new scripts and characters. For additional details regarding new emoji, see Emoji Recently Added, v18.0

No new algorithms have been introduced in this release, but new data files have been added for Seal and other East Asian scripts, along with a new Unicode Standard Annex documenting these new data files: UAX #60, Data for East Asian Scripts.

Conformance language related to variation selectors has been updated, making clearer which uses of variation selectors are or are not conformant to the Unicode Standard. 

Recommendations for implementations were also added to make non-conformant uses of variation selectors visible in text. This is important as research has shown that sequences of invisible variation selector characters can be used to attack modern AI applications.

For complete details on Unicode Version 18.0, see https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode18.0.0/. 

Unicode CLDR 49 Alpha available for testing

The Unicode CLDR 49 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?)

The alpha has already been integrated into the development versions of ICU and ICU4X. We would especially appreciate feedback from non-ICU consumers of CLDR data on Migration issues. Feedback can be filed using CLDR Tickets.

Some of the most significant changes in this release include the following (for more detail, see the CLDR 49 release note page):

• Updated for Unicode 18 including annotations for the new emoji, new scripts, etc.
• Reflects the most recent updates to external standards and data sources, such as the language subtag registry, UN M49 macro regions, ISO 4217 currencies, etc.
• New formatting options:
• New date & time formatting options including:
• Localized patterns for gluing date & timezoneAppend Items — e.g., Sept 3, EST
• Ordinal days in dates — e.g., Sept 3rd
• Customizing numeric separators for dates and times in patterns: 3-10-2031 → 3/10/2031
• UTC timezone display patterns
• Dual Standard/Daylight format — Sept 3, UTC+3/+2
• Structure for preventing digit-digit merges — e.g., '2026/1/29 GMT-817时'
• Additional skeleton-patterns added for flexible and interval date formats
• Nested bracket replacement — for constructing locale names with parts that have parentheses, e.g., ”birmanês (Mianmar [Birmânia])”
• Additional localized locale display name options - see keys
• New and updated plural and ordinal rules
• New and improved rule-based number formatting (spellout) rules for many new locales
• New units — poundal, dyne, milliinch (US mil)
• Many enhancements of the CLDR specification (LDML) will be in the CLDR 49 Beta (September 23rd).

Locale Coverage Levels

Level	Count	Regional Variants	Usage
Modern	100	399	Suitable for full UI internationalization
Moderate	12	14	Suitable for “document content” internationalization, eg. in spreadsheet
Basic	73	99	Suitable for locale selection, eg. choice of language on mobile phone

This is the second release where the new CLDR Organization process is in place for DDL languages. As a result, several locales were able to reach higher levels or had substantial contributions:

• Adyghe, Kabardian: Adyghe Language and Literature Association
• Laz: Laz Instittue
• Ligurian: Council for Ligurian Linguistic Heritage
• Mara: Mara Language Preservation
• Coptic: St. Shenouda Coptic Society

±	New Level	Locales
📈	Modern	Akan
📈	Moderate	Breton, Coptic
📈	Moderate*	Romansh, Shan, Tigrinya
📈	Basic	Adyghe, Central Kurdish, Colognian, Kabardian, Kikuyu, Kʼicheʼ, Ladin, Prussian, Qʼeqchiʼ, Sunwar (Sunuwar)
📉	Basic*	Tajik, Bashkir, Interlingua, Sardinian, Faroese, Venetian

Note: Each release, the number of items needed for Modern and Moderate increases. So locales without active contributors may drop down in coverage level.

For the details, see the CLDR 49 release note page, which has information on accessing the data, reviewing charts of the changes, and — importantly — will cover Migration issues.

ICU4X 2.3 Released!

 The ICU4X Technical Committee is happy to announce ICU4X 2.3, an update to our modular, portable, and secure i18n library.

ICU4X is Unicode's modern, lightweight, portable, and secure i18n library. Built from the ground up, its binary size and memory usage footprint is 50-90% smaller than ICU4C. It is memory-safe, written in Rust with interfaces into C++, JavaScript, Dart, TypeScript, Kotlin — with other languages in the timeline. Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Pixel Watch, core Android, numerous Flutter apps, and more clients are already using ICU4X.

Important changes in ICU4X 2.3 include:

1. [Preview] New Rule-Based Segmenters (icu_segmenter):
1. This release introduces a redesigned segmentation engine based on PRI #555, which improves correctness and enables ICU4X to implement the latest Unicode release. Look for new_neo constructors on the Grapheme, Word, Sentence, and Line segmenters.
2. The hand-written state tables have also been fully updated to Unicode 17. Look for new_17 constructors on the Line segmenter. (Note: Unicode 17 is already the default behavior for Grapheme, Word, and Sentence segmenters.)
3. 💬 We want your feedback! Please help evaluate how these new segmentation engines hold up in real-life workloads and provide feedback around performance and correctness on GitHub.
2. Stable Dart Release:
1. The Dart icu4x package is released as stable on pub.dev for the first time, making it easier to integrate with Flutter apps.
3. [Preview] Locale Display Names (icu_locale::names):
1. New home: Moved single display name formatting from icu_experimental into icu_locale::names.
2. Full support for language identifiers: Renders localized display names for language identifiers, regions, scripts, and variants (including FFI support across C++, Dart, JavaScript, and Kotlin).
3. Data Slicing: Data loading is now split into Tiny, Light, and Heavy depth slices, allowing applications to include only what they need to minimize data footprint.
4. 💬 We want your feedback! As locale display names move closer to stabilization, we welcome feedback on the API surface and data model on GitHub.
4. Date & Time Formatting & Date Range Formatter (icu_datetime):
1. [Preview] Date Range Formatting: Added experimental support for date range formatting, enabling the ability to format strings like “Dec 22 – 23, 2026”.
2. Flexible Day Periods: Implemented flexible day periods (such as "in the morning" or "at night").
3. Formatting & Pattern Fixes: Added support for numbering system overrides in datetime patterns, preserved zero minutes in 24-hour optional minute formatting, and improved calendar resolution for locale-implied regions.
5. [Experimental] Currency Formatting:
1. Major API Redesign: Overhauled currency formatting in icu_experimental to support generic value representations.
2. Dedicated Constructors & Options: Introduced dedicated options for symbol, narrow symbol, currency name, compact variants, ISO codes, and accounting usage.
6. [Preview] UnicodeSet Parser (icu_properties):
1. New home: Moved UTS#35 UnicodeSet parsing from icu_experimental into icu_properties.
2. New syntax & properties: Added support for East Asian Width set syntax and updated property constants to align with official Unicode 17 property names.

See the GitHub release for more details

Check out our quickstart tutorial, interactive demo, or C++, TypeScript, and Dart documentation.

As before, the Rust crate is available at crates.io, with documentation at docs.rs. 

Please post any questions via GitHub Discussions.

Why do some new emoji look familiar?

By Jennifer Daniel, originally posted on Substack

Hello from the formatting trenches of the internet.

If you are reading, congratulations! This means we are almost done with another cycle of trying to squeeze the staggering, terrifying breadth of human existence into itty bitty graphics. The Emoji Standard and Research Working Group has been busy standardizing the existential weight of a brined cucumber and analyzing the structural integrity of a lighthouse. You know, standard, high-stakes international diplomacy.

Since Friday week marks 📅 THE 📅 DAY 📅 DISPLAYED 📅 ON 📅 THE 📅 CALENDAR 📅 EMOJI 📅 I thought it would nice to peek at the new emoji heading to your keyboard next Spring.

First up, I don't know how you’re gonna last another year without a Lighthouse. This coastal beacon functions as a literal guiding light through the dark night of your soul. Or an Eraser, which can’t undo that 2 AM text, but helps when retroactive boundary-setting or communicating the urge to wipe the slate clean. We even got new hand emoji. While our beloved index finger points 👉 “Look at that coordinate,” the new Leftwards/Rightwards Thumb Sign says, “Look at this guy.”

Are these new glyphs indispensable? No. Is anything truly indispensable? Also, no. But they are ours to text our moms, troll our group chats, and beautifully obfuscate or elevate our true feelings.

The Cracked Smiling Face

Because sometimes, “I’m fine!” means “I’m very much not fine!”

A visual externalization of an internal rupture. It’s the “Mask of Perfection” failing in real-time. It moves beyond standard emotion to capture the exact tension between your public persona and your private reality. Use it when your carefully crafted facade has cracked but you’re smiling through the shards.

Net with Handle

While it’s easy to look at your keyboard and see nouns (like an alembic ⚗️ or a bucket 🪣), the net functions instantly as a verb. It represents the process of catching or pulling something out of the digital ether. Maybe you're harvesting data, catching a vibe, or collecting whatever it is you collect. When an emoji can be more than just an object and can represent an action, it gives our digital lexicon something it craves: kinetic energy.

The Meteor

Originally, when the Comet emoji first debuted it was drawn as a sparkling blue ball of ice moving across the galaxy. Then a rando changed the design to a red-hot rock entering the atmosphere. THESE ARE NOT THE SAME. Wishing on a star and witnessing an extinction-level event are two entirely different energies.

Now that Unicode is adding a distinct Meteor emoji, it forces a reconciliation. Fonts with a ball of fire will move that design to this new home (aka codepoint), leaving the Comet to be a consistent, celestial blue ice streak across all vendors. While the Comet remains a wish, the Meteor is here for your deepest existential crises. Drop it when the timeline is melting down, an argument enters a catastrophic phase, or you just want to signal cosmic finality. I'll be using it to represent doom scrolling.

Notably, Emoji 18.0 updates several existing designs to fix these switcheroos without taking away any emoji. Just like giving the "flaming meatball" design its own official home as the Meteor so the Comet ☄️ can return to blue, long-standing issues plaguing classics like the cucumber 🥒 and butterfly 🦋 are getting adjusted. Giving these distinct concepts their own space ensures everyone can flirt without risk.

The Pickle

“But Jennifer,” you ask, “We already have the cucumber 🥒!”

Listen to me: a cucumber is crisp, hydrated, and best served at the spa. A pickle has seen things. It has undergone a chemical transformation. Beyond being a critical asset for sandwich aesthetics and the American sport of pickleball, the pickle fills a massive semantic void: the tricky situation.

With this update, we are finally forcing a permanent split. The cucumber gets to stay a cucumber across all platforms, and the pickle is officially moving out and getting its own space to ferment.

Instead of typing out a three-paragraph text explaining how you accidentally double-booked yourself or got tangled up in situationship drama, you can simply drop a pickle. You are in one.

The Monarch Butterfly

If this emoji looks familiar… you’re not going crazy. That’s because depending on what phone your friends use, you might have been texting them a Monarch butterfly while they were looking at a Morpho.

The blue Morpho is locked down globally as the symbol for “pretty aesthetics” and manicured Instagram feeds. The Monarch is an entirely different beast. This update finally fixes that fragmentation making way for Monarch butterfly to land in its own brand-new home. With its iconic orange-and-black stained-glass pattern, it introduces a different weight class of meaning, carrying a narrative of generational resilience, endurance, and deep ancestral memory. This is a creature that travels thousands of miles across continents over lifespans it will never see the completion of.

Much like the volunteers of the Emoji Standard and Research Working Group. As more emoji are added into the Unicode Standard, we’ll never see the completion of the emoji project but hopefully, the groundwork we lay today means someone a hundred years from now can perfectly express the pickle we got them in. 🥒 ➔ 🫙

Until then, we have next Spring to look forward to. Go grab your pickle jars and prepare your group chats.

Love,

jd

Recent Unicode Happenings: June 2026

Do you call it soccer or football? Is ⚽ “bola,” “ボール,” or “ كرة?”

The biggest sporting event in the world is underway — keep reading to find out what this could possibly have to do with Unicode, and how you can get involved as well!

Unicode 18.0 Beta Review Opens for Feedback

 By: Peter Constable, Chair of the Unicode Technical Committee

The Unicode® Standard provides the character encoding that underlies text in the world’s language on billions of devices, in apps and across the web. The next version of the standard, version 18.0, will be released later this year. A beta review period for Unicode 18.0 has started and is open until July 7, 2026.

The beta is intended primarily for review of character property data and changes to algorithm specifications (Unicode Standard Annexes and certain Unicode Technical Standards that are synchronized with the Unicode Standard). Implementers are encouraged to review these changes for consistency or unexpected issues. Also, a complete draft of the core specification text is available for review during the beta period.

At this phase of a release, the character repertoire is considered stable. No new characters will be added. Characters that are new in this version could still be removed, and their character names or code points could be changed, but such changes would require strong justification.

For this release, 13,047 new characters will be added, bringing the total number of encoded characters in Unicode 18.0 to 172,848. The largest set of additional characters is for the new Small Seal script with 11,328 ideographs. Other notable character additions include:

• Chisoi script: a modern script used in northeast India.
• Jurchen script: an historic ideographic script used in northeastern China during the Jin and Ming dynasties.
• New currency symbols for the Maldivian rufiyaa, Omani rial and UAE dirham currencies.
• 72 historical mathematical symbols.
• 73 musical symbols.
• Nine new emoji characters.

See The Pipeline and the delta code charts pages for details on all of the new characters.

In addition to new characters, there are some significant changes related to character properties or algorithms, including the following:

• A new Unicode Standard Annex will be added to document properties for large, non-CJK East Asian scripts.
• Two provisional properties for CJK Unified ideographs will be removed, and two new provisional properties will be added.
• The derivation of one of the properties used for grapheme cluster segmentation of Indic scripts will be revised.
• There will be significant revisions to the confusable characters data (confusables.txt) relevant for security.

It was found that wording in the core specification of earlier versions was not completely clear regarding variation sequences and conformance. To provide greater clarity, the text describing variation sequences and related conformance requirements will be revised. See section 3.6.2 in the draft core spec for details.

See the Unicode 18.0 Beta landing page for other noteworthy property and algorithm changes. For full details regarding the Beta review, see Public Review Issue #548. Feedback should be reported under PRI #548 using the Unicode Contact Form by July 7, 2026.

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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

Unicode CLDR 49: Submission open through June 2026

The Unicode® CLDR Survey Tool is open for submission for version 49 through June (see detailed schedule below). CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages (dates, times, numbers, sort order, etc.). 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 new areas in CLDR 49 are focused on:

• Unicode 18 additions: new emoji, script names, …

• Improvements in date and time and locale display names formatting

• New languages available for submission in Survey Tool: Adyghe [ady], Brahui [brh], Hunsrik [hrx],  Interslavic [isv], Kabardian [kbd], Kaitag [xdq], Mara [mrh], and Susu [sus] 

General Submission for TC locales* opened recently and is slated to finish on June 10, 2026. The Survey Tool then enters a vetting phase, where contributors select the best data for each field. That vetting phase is slated to finish on June 29. The draft data will be available in a public alpha in early August, and the final release is targeted for mid-October.

Other locales, managed by the DDL Working Group, have a longer submission period to allow smaller organizations to submit data on a more flexible timeline. The Survey Tool opened earlier for these locales, and will stay in Extended Submission until the end of June, so that these organizations can contribute data for the current release.

Each new locale starts with a small set of Core data, such as a list of characters used in the language. Submitters of those locales need to bring the coverage up to Basic level (very basic basic dates, times, numbers, and endonyms) during the following submission cycle. Once a language reaches Basic coverage, it has the minimum support for use in language selection, such as on mobile devices. In the next submission cycle, the name of that language is also added for translation for all languages at Modern coverage. Locales that reach a higher level of coverage (Moderate or Modern) are suitable for general-purpose support in applications and operating systems.

If you would like to contribute missing data for your language, see Survey Tool Accounts. For more information on contributing to CLDR, see the CLDR Information Hub.

* TC Locales are ones for which major organizations commit to adding data in concert over a short span of time each year.

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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