Digital text, legacy tech and the many meanings of identity
For many internet users, the mission to digitally encode the world’s languages can appear complete. Yet, while Unicode has accomplished a robust foundation for digital text encoding of the vast majority of the world’s scripts, in practice, even languages with globe-spanning communities and prominent status are not always adequately represented. This study investigates how online webforms embed error in data systems and digital identities by failing to accurately process names outside of the Anglosphere. Most webforms could use Unicode to facilitate diacritical marks (so-called ‘special characters’ like the Irish síneadh fada or the French circumflex), but backend validation scripts, legacy databases or constrained input fields block non-ASCII characters. Users have to perform an anglicisation of their name in order to gain access to digital services, stripping out the accents so that their name is “acceptable” to the system. Grounded in a recent public campaign in Ireland advocating for the systemic acceptance of Irish-language names, this study presents survey data assessing the social, emotional and cultural impacts of this name misrepresentation, and considers the implications for citizens as governments scale digital identity systems using the same structures. For Unicode in the World, this is a timely illustration of how Unicode offers tools for multilingual representation, but implementation still requires key drivers – commercial, ideological, or regulatory – to ensure adoption in every situation. It allows policymakers, localisation professionals and product managers to understand Unicode as part of a broader infrastructure of standards and requirements, and invites scholars and advocates to consider what it might take to contest the soft-power coloniality of an Anglocentric digital world.