You may have skipped past my name at the start of this blog (we all do), but I invite you to look at it now. It’s likely to be a name you haven’t come across before, because it’s in the Irish language – even in Ireland, it’s a relatively ra…
The people who work on the world’s writing systems are scattered across continents, and we rarely get to sit in the same room. This past March offered a rare exception: two back-to-back European events — a workshop in Liège and a conference…
Before I joined the Script Encoding Initiative, my understanding of Unicode and script encoding was limited to its basic role in digital devices and the personal struggles I had encountered typing bidirectional text in my Arabic classes. I
At any given time, the Script Encoding Initiative has upwards of a dozen research projects in progress, aimed at including new scripts in the Unicode Standard. Because each script presents its own technical, historical, and community-specif…
Some projects can be completed in a year; others unfold over the better part of a decade. In 2019, SEI began its work on Classic Maya hieroglyphs through a grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities and a partnership with the…
Behind what most take for granted on screens today is the Unicode Consortium, the non-profit standards body responsible for the internationalization of software. Unicode’s role as a global utility is shaped not only by technical decisions b…
For a long time, it has been a journey of mine to battle for Arabic fluency. With no one else in my household speaking the language, I’ve had to rely on online conversations with native speakers. Yet, without fluency, much of this correspon…
Last Tuesday marked the release of the latest edition of the Unicode Standard, 17.0. It included four new scripts – Beria Erfe, Sidetic, Tai Yo, and Tolong Siki – and a total of nearly five thousand new characters.1 Since its first release
In 2004, Charles Riley posed a question that continues to shape his work today: why weren’t more African scripts included in the Unicode Standard? At the time, he was a library catalog assistant attending his first Unicode meeting. Two deca…
Even as a relative newcomer to the world of script encoding, Oreen Yousuf has already made a prolific impact with his research on African scripts. He first stepped on to the scene with an exhaustive report on the status of over fifty Africa…
“I never imagined I would enjoy researching this much. This trip has given me more curiosity than answers, and I want to continue doing this on a larger scale.” Named after the community native to the area, Lampung script is used at the sou…
One of the most significant updates to the SEI website is the addition of a Script Readiness rubric. This post delves into the motivation behind developing this tool and how we hope you’ll use it. Let’s start with a bit of background on how…