Thursday, March 28, 2024

Wikimedia Foundation Joins as an Associate Member of the Unicode Consortium

Wikimedia Logo ImageThe Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce that Wikimedia Foundation has joined as its latest organizational member.

The Wikimedia Foundation hosts the most multilingual top-10 website on the internet, Wikipedia, which is built collaboratively by people around the world – and in more than 300 languages.

“Our projects have been supported by the resources, technical projects, and forums supported by the Unicode Consortium. Through initiatives like the CLDR project, for example, Language and Internationalization engineers at the Wikimedia Foundation and volunteers on our projects have contributed to the open-source knowledge infrastructure that serves a shared mission with the Consortium of expanding language representation online. We’re looking forward to future collaborations with the Unicode Consortium as the Wikimedia movement continues to prioritize global access to knowledge in the fast-changing digital space.”
— Selena Deckelmann, Chief Product and Technology Officer

“We’re excited to welcome the Wikimedia Foundation as our latest organizational member, enhancing our shared mission to promote global language representation. We greatly appreciate the contributions from the Wikimedia team over the years and look forward to accelerating our collaboration.”
— Toral Cowieson, CEO

Associate members of the Consortium have observation status on one technical committee. The list of Consortium members can be found here.


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πŸ•‰️πŸ’—πŸŽ️🐨πŸ”₯πŸš€ηˆ±₿♜πŸ€

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.

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Volunteer Spotlight — Roozbeh Pournader

Roozbeh Pournader ImageThe rewards have been much greater than I could have ever imagined.”

Roozbeh Pournader has been a volunteer at Unicode since 1999. His first exposure to Unicode was in the late 90’s when he and several colleagues were working on a project called FarsiWeb at Sharif University trying to figure out how best to properly support Persian on the internet. They encountered several “home-made” solutions.

They also discovered The Unicode Standard. Quickly realizing Unicode was the right path, Roozbeh reached out and found a welcoming community of supportive and like-minded technologists. Roozbeh recalls engaging with Mark Davis, Ken Whistler, and Rick McGowan who “were there to help anybody who wanted to use or contribute to Unicode.” Roozbeh became an active contributor when recognizing areas within Unicode that he could help improve.

Roozbeh arrived in the United States in 2008, having represented an Iranian standards organization to Unicode before that. Since then, he has also been a technical representative for several US organizations to the Consortium, a Technical Director, and is currently a Vice Chair of the Script Encoding Working Group. He remembers how excited he was to be involved in person with Unicode when he first came to the US, sharing that he walked off the plane on a Wednesday and on Friday he was attending his first UTC meeting.

Asked what he likes most about working with Unicode, he admits that it is hard to say. He knows that what he has done and is doing has an enormous impact on communities around the world. Roozbeh came from an underserved community and is pleased that he can use his skills to support minority languages, historical languages, and writing systems for other underserved communities. He is especially proud of his work in the area of Arabic script and says everyday is a joy to work with people who are so dedicated to the Unicode cause.

On a personal note, Roozbeh enjoys eating anything his wife prepares, and says that as scientists (his wife is a biologist), they are fascinated by scientific methods of cooking and experimenting in the kitchen. His favorite dish is Kabab Tabe’i, a mixture of ground meat, onions and tomatoes. When asked about any hobbies outside of work, Roozbeh says that Unicode is really not his work anymore, it is his life’s work and where he spends most of his free time.

His parting words were to encourage anyone who is interested in Unicode to get involved. There are big and small ways to contribute, and he recommends just reaching out as the Unicode community is so welcoming.

Roozbeh says he has made lifetime friends of the highest quality and for that he is forever grateful.


Adopt a Character and Support Unicode’s Mission

Looking to give that special someone a special something?
Or maybe something to treat yourself?
πŸ•‰️πŸ’—πŸŽ️🐨πŸ”₯πŸš€ηˆ±₿♜πŸ€

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

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Cathy Wissink joins Unicode Board, other Board Updates

Cathy Wissink ImageUnicode Consortium is excited to welcome Cathy Wissink to the Board effective immediately. Cathy is a 30-year veteran of the global tech industry. Most of her career was spent at Microsoft, with her early tenure devoted to internationalization support for Windows. She then spent 15 years working focused on global government and regulatory affairs. In her most recent role at Microsoft, Cathy managed a part of Microsoft’s standards portfolio supporting regulatory needs in forums like ISO/IEC JTC1, CEN/CENELEC, NIST, and also led Microsoft’s product certification process for China.

Cathy led Microsoft’s participation in the Unicode Technical Committee from 2000-2005, and served as UTC vice-chair and INCITS/L2 chair from 2002-2005.

The Board also elected Tim Brandall and Salvo Giammarresi as Chair and Vice Chair of the Finance and Funding Committee. Tim was also named Treasurer of the Board.

Adopt a Character and Support Unicode’s Mission

Looking to give that special someone a special something?
Or maybe something to treat yourself?
πŸ•‰️πŸ’—πŸŽ️🐨πŸ”₯πŸš€ηˆ±₿♜πŸ€

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

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Emoji submissions intake process opening on April 2, 2024!

Emoji Image

It’s that time of year. For some of us that means the birds are chirping and the weather is getting warmer. For others, the leaves are changing color and you’re unpacking your coats. No matter where you are in the world, you can submit an emoji proposal starting April 2, 2024 and the Emoji Standard and Research Working Group is looking forward to receiving your submissions. πŸ“„πŸ‘€

Whether you’re new to the process or a veteran contributor to the Unicode Standard please take note: a few changes have been made to the Guidelines for Submitting Unicode® Emoji Proposals. So, as you prepare your documents, consider the following steps to ensure your work meets all the requirements to be considered.

Step 1: See if it’s already been approved or “under consideration”

It seems obvious but if it’s already an emoji (or if we’ve reviewed a similar proposal) your job is done! Scan the list of Emoji Requests and see whether your proposed emoji has previously been submitted.

Emoji that are listed as “Prioritization Pending” or “Under Consideration” do not require additional proposals. πŸ†• Emoji declined within the last four years are not eligible for re-review.

Step 2: Familiarize yourself with Criteria for Inclusion

We recommend reading recently successful proposals. It may also be worth your time scrolling through the Emoji Submission FAQ, which includes common questions and answers.

Note: Some proposals will not be considered for encoding which include but are not limited to flags, logos, UI icons, specific people, or designs that include text. πŸ†• A full list of the types that will not be reviewed can be found here.

Hot tip: Advocating for an emoji on behalf of an important social cause? A proposal may be advanced despite a “cause” argument - if other factors are compelling - but will not be advanced because of it.

Step 3: Prepare your proposal document

Completing the Guidelines for Submitting Unicode® Emoji Proposals is critical. Take note of the Selection Factors and Emoji Encoding Principles as well as this section on Limitations on Emoji Encoding. Don’t skip any of the fields in the form! The Emoji Standard and Research Working Group [ESC] receives a lot of submissions, and complete proposals helps the ESC best evaluate them.

Your document must contain all of the sections shown in this format, provide empirical evidence, and address all of the questions specified there as completely as possible. Review your proposal document to confirm it is complete, has all of the necessary frequency citations, the images are not copyrighted, and meets all of the selection factors.

Hot Tip: The ESC has updated the required sources for frequency data. Previously Google & Bing Search was accepted but recently removed a mechanism that quantified the queries. Moving forward, submissions should quote Google Books and Google Ngram Viewer stats.

Step 4: Submit your documents

If you have gotten this far, congratulations. You’re almost done and the ESC’s work has just begun.

Submit your proposal as a PDF with reference images using the Unicode Emoji Submission Form. Your complete “Submission” will be made up of the completed form, which includes acceptance of the Emoji Proposal Agreement & License, and your proposal PDF.

Hot Tip: πŸ†• You no longer have to submit images separately from the proposal PDF. All images will now be included directly in the PDF.

The submission window will be open April 2 through July 31, 2024 and all submissions will be notified of their status by November 30, 2024.

Good luck and happy emoji-ing! ✨πŸ˜ƒπŸ”Ž✍️✨

Hot Tip: Register now for the upcoming webinar on April 16, “How to make your emoji proposal the best that it can be!”


Adopt a Character and Support Unicode’s Mission

Looking to give that special someone a special something?
Or maybe something to treat yourself?
πŸ•‰️πŸ’—πŸŽ️🐨πŸ”₯πŸš€ηˆ±₿♜πŸ€

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

Friday, March 8, 2024

Breaking the Cycle πŸ”—πŸ’₯

by Jennifer Daniel

(This article was originally published on Jennifer’s Substack, January 17, 2023. Republished here with minor revision.)

Phoenix image
In the fall of 2022, the Unicode Technical Committee announced that the 2023 release of the Unicode Standard would be a “dot” release with limited character additions, with the next major release in 2024. This wasn’t without precedent — COVID slowed down the release of Unicode 14.0 in 2020 and the world seemed to survive πŸ˜‰. 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 😁πŸ₯°πŸ₯ΉπŸ€”πŸ«£πŸ«‘😡‍πŸ’«!) — 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 πŸ‘© 🏽 +🏭 = πŸ§‘πŸ½‍🏭).

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 ( πŸ§‘πŸ»‍❤️‍πŸ§‘πŸΏ) others do not ( πŸ‘―). A few non RGI emoji render with tone but with no affordance to change one of the two characters (For example, 🀼🏾‍♂ renders with skintone on Android but as gold on iOS. WHY. This is why we standardize these things, people).

And then ... There is the suite of family emoji (πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘¦‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘§πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘§‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘§‍πŸ‘§πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘¦‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘§πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘§‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘§‍πŸ‘§ πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘¦‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘§πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘§‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘§‍πŸ‘§πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘¦‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘§πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘§‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘§‍πŸ‘§πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘¦‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘§πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘§‍πŸ‘¦πŸ‘¨‍πŸ‘©‍πŸ‘§‍πŸ‘§πŸ‘ͺ). 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:

Families image

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, mutliracial 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 πŸ˜‰

Different families image
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.

Famiy, symbol image

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

Right to Left emoji image
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. (Note: I know it sounds like I’m talking about the past and future simultaneously ... the emoji lifecycle is looooong and as a result overlaps with multiple releases. Expect a future blog post about the Emoji 15.0 candidates landing early this year (Shout out goose, pink heart, and pushing hands). I’ve been holding off writing about this set until you can actually see them on your phones but given that we’re already talking about 2024 maybe it’s time I dust that blog post off).

Emoji 2023 timeline image

Anyways, among the list of Emoji 15.1 recommendations for 2024 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 and other emoji image

Broken chain is the result of a πŸ”—πŸ’₯ ZWJ and contains a variety of meanings, such as freedom, breaking a cycle, or perhaps a broken url ;-). Nodding face and shaking face are composed of arrows to imply movement in a still image (πŸ™‚↔️) and (πŸ™‚↕️). Oh, and of course there is a phoenix rising from the ashes (🐦πŸ”₯), an ancient metaphor that captures the zeitgeist of 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.


Adopt a Character and Support Unicode’s Mission

Looking to give that special someone a special something?
Or maybe something to treat yourself?
πŸ•‰️πŸ’—πŸŽ️🐨πŸ”₯πŸš€ηˆ±₿♜πŸ€

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

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Unicode CLDR v45 Alpha available for testing

[image]

The Unicode CLDR v45 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.


CLDR 45 is a closed release with no submission period, focusing on just a few areas:

MessageFormat 2.0 Tech Preview

Software needs to construct messages that incorporate various pieces of information. The complexities of the world's languages make this challenging. The goal for MessageFormat 2.0  is to allow developers and translators to create natural-sounding, grammatically-correct, user interfaces that can appear in any language and support the needs of diverse cultures.


The new MessageFormat defines the data model, syntax, processing, and conformance requirements for the next generation of dynamic messages. It is intended for adoption by programming languages, software libraries, and software localization tooling. It enables the integration of internationalization APIs (such as date or number formats), and grammatical matching (such as plurals or genders). It is extensible, allowing software developers to create formatting or message selection logic that add on to the core capabilities. Its data model provides a means of representing existing syntaxes, thus enabling gradual adoption by users of older formatting systems.


See also:

Keyboard 3.0 stable version

Keyboard support for digitally disadvantaged languages is often lacking or inconsistent between platforms. The updated LDML Keyboard 3.0 format specifies an interchange format for keyboard data. This will allow keyboard authors to create a single mapping file for their language, which implementations can use to provide that language’s keyboard mapping on their own platform. This format allows both physical and virtual (that is, on-screen or touch) keyboard layouts for a language to be defined in a single file.


See also:

Tooling changes

Many tooling changes are difficult to accommodate in a data-submission release, including performance work and UI improvements. The changes in v45 provide faster turn-around for linguists and higher data quality. They are targeted at the v46 submission period, starting in May, 2024.

For more information

See the draft CLDR v45 release page, which has information on accessing the data, reviewing charts of the changes, and — importantly — Migration issues.



Adopt a Character and Support Unicode’s Mission

Looking to give that special someone a special something?
Or maybe something to treat yourself?
πŸ•‰️πŸ’—πŸŽ️🐨πŸ”₯πŸš€ηˆ±₿♜πŸ€

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