Unicode 2019 Bulldog Awards

The Unicode Consortium announces the 2019 Bulldog Award recipients: Andy Heninger and Norbert Lindenberg.

Andy Heninger is recognized for many years of contributions to the work of the Consortium, including providing crucial implementations of segmentation and regular expression support in International Components for Unicode (ICU). Prior to having these functions in ICU, support for them in Unicode implementations was very limited. Both contributions are key to robust text support. For example, correct segmentation is what keeps family emoji from splitting apart!

Norbert Lindenberg has made significant contributions over the years to internationalizing the Web and has brought deep script expertise to the Unicode Script Ad Hoc group. He has contributed to the models of many of the Unicode Standard’s complex scripts, including Thai, Myanmar, Khmer, Javanese, and Tamil. His work has been used by organizations such as Mozilla, Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems, and Apple.

For many years, both have been bulldogs for robust Unicode text support.

More details of their many contributions can be found on the Unicode Bulldog Award page.

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Over 136,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

Emoji 12.1 release: 168 Emoji added

Emoji 12.1, with 168 new emoji, has been released. There are 138 new gender-neutral forms, so you will soon be able to text about people without specifying their gender. Thirty new combinations of people holding hands with various skin tones were also added.

The new emoji are listed in Emoji Recently Added v12.1, along with sample images. These images are merely samples: vendors for mobile phones, PCs, and web platforms will typically design their own fonts for emoji. In particular, the Emoji Ordering v12.1 chart shows how the new emoji should be sorted within the order of existing emoji, with new emoji marked with rounded rectangles. The other Emoji Charts for Version 12.1 have been updated to show the emoji.

Initial names and search keywords are available in different languages in Unicode CLDR 36, such as health worker (doctor, nurse, ...). Those will be refined during this quarter.

The new Emoji 12.1 data is available for vendors to use for their emoji fonts and code. These new emoji should start showing up on mobile phones in this quarter and next quarter. The new emoji will soon be available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work to support digitally-disadvantaged languages.

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Over 136,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

The Most Frequent Emoji

How does the Unicode Consortium choose which new emoji to add? One important factor is data about how frequently the current emoji are used. Patterns of usage help to inform decisions about future emoji. The Consortium has been working to assemble this information and make it available to the public.

And the two most frequently used emoji in the world are...

😂 and ❤️

The new Unicode Emoji Frequency page shows a list of the Unicode v12.0 emoji ranked in order of how frequently they are used.

“The forecasted frequency of use is a key factor in determining whether to encode new emoji, and for that it is important to know the frequency of use of existing emoji,” said Mark Davis, President of the Unicode Consortium. “Understanding how frequently emoji are used helps prioritize which categories to focus on and which emoji to add to the Standard.”

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Over 136,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

ICU 65 Released

Unicode® ICU 65 has just been released. It updates to CLDR 36 locale data with many additions and corrections, and some new measurement units. The Java LocaleMatcher API is improved, and ported to C++. For building ICU data, there are new filtering options, and new tracing support for data loading in ICU4C.

ICU is a software library widely used by products and other libraries to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode Standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

For details please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/65.

Unicode CLDR Version 36 Language/Locale Data Released

Unicode CLDR 36 provides an update to the key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages. CLDR data is used by all major software systems for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks.

CLDR 36 included a full Survey Tool data collection phase, adding approximately 32K new translated fields, with significant increases in moderate and/or modern coverage for: ceb (Cebuano), ha (Hausa / Latin script), ig (Igbo), kok (Konkani), qu (Quechua), to (Tongan), yo (Yoruba). Seed data was added for several new languages: cic (Chickasaw), mus (Muscogee), osa (Osage, Osage script); an (Aragonese), su (Sundanese, Latin script), szl (Silesian).

Enhancements in v36 include:

• New Emoji 13 draft candidates’ names and search keywords are included in this release to support smooth adoption of the upcoming Emoji release (scheduled for release in 2020Q1 as part of Unicode 13)
• New measurement units and patterns: dot-per-centimeter, dot-per-inch, em, megapixel, pixel, pixel-per-centimeter, pixel-per-inch; decade; therm-us; bar, pascal; and a pattern for combining units in a multiplicative relationship, such as “newton-meter”.
• Locale IDs:
  
  • Extended Language Matching to have fallbacks for many encompassed languages.
  • Added more languageAliases from the BCP47 language subtag registry, for deprecated languages.
• A new test directory added for localeIdentifiers, graphemeClusters (for currently supported Indic languages) and transliterations.

There are some infrastructure changes to be aware of, including:

• The cldr repository has moved from subversion to git, and queries using Trac no longer work. See CLDR Change Requests for new information.
• The data in the cldr repository now preserves votes for inherited data, indicated with “↑↑↑”. In order to generate CLDR in the previous form without “↑↑↑” and with proper minimization, a new tool GenerateProductionData is available.
  Note: Release data that has been processed with GenerateProductionData is available in a parallel cldr-staging repository, with the same release tags.
  

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The Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages, with the largest and most extensive standard repository of locale data available. This data is used by a wide spectrum of companies for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks as:

• Locale-specific patterns for formatting and parsing: dates, times, time zones, numbers and currency values, measurement units,…
• Translations of names: languages, scripts, countries and regions, currencies, eras, months, weekdays, day periods, time zones, cities, and time units, emoji characters and sequences (and search keywords),…
• Language & script information: characters used; plural cases; gender of lists; capitalization; rules for sorting & searching; writing direction; transliteration rules; rules for spelling out numbers; rules for segmenting text into graphemes, words, and sentences; keyboard layouts;…
• Country information: language usage, currency information, calendar preference, week conventions, …
• Validity: Definitions, aliases, and validity information for Unicode locales, languages, scripts, regions, and extensions,…

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Over 136,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.