Welcome
The Unicode Consortium, founded in 1991, brings together software industry corporations, governments, researchers and other organizations and individuals working on software internationalization and localization.
The Consortium develops and maintains a wide spectrum of globalization standards and data repositories that are deployed as the foundation for internationalization and localization of software on every platform around the world.
Prominent among these standards and repositories are the Unicode Standard, which provides the universal character encoding for all text, and the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR), which provides core data and structure for internationalization services.
How to Use this Site
The pages listed in the navigation bar on the left side of each page provide
some useful links, both internal to the current page as well as
to other parts of the site.
To find out about all other topics please visit the
Site Map or return to the home page
and select one of the major topics accessible from there.
Finally, the Search
feature supports several kinds of searches for most of the pages
on this site. Not all pages can be searched: only the most
current version of a Technical Report can be searched, for
example.
How to Participate in the Unicode Consortium's Work
The Unicode Mailing Lists
You can also join the mail list of Unicode users, which has searchable online archives.
Social Media
Unicode is present on all major social media outlets. You can use blogger, become a Unicode friend on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter for the latest in announcements and news.
Unicode Frequently Asked Questions
Unicode FAQs are organized in over 35 topic pages, making them easy to navigate and search. Use the contact form if you want to update the text of an FAQ or suggest material for new questions.
Becoming a Member
Members of the Consortium can participate more actively by getting involved with any of the three technical committees. It's a great idea to join the Unicode Consortium if you work with software and text or localization. For more information, see Joining the Unicode Consortium.
Unicode Technical Committee (UTC)
The UTC develops the Unicode Standard and its associated standards,
algorithms, and data to ensure interoperability in content and interchange
of text. The UTC encodes new characters, including symbols, ideographs,
and unencoded scripts, to meet the needs of industry, governments, and
user communities throughout the world.
Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR)
The Unicode CLDR provides the world's most extensive standard repository of locale data, used by companies for their software internationalization and localization. See how you can become part of the CLDR Process.
The Unicode Conference
The Unicode Consortium holds an annual Internationalization and Unicode Conference. You can attend the conference to learn more about Unicode and localization or even present a paper.
Online Data and Programs
The Online Data provides access to downloadable data essential to implementers of the Unicode Standard and of other specifications of the Unicode Consortium.
![[Unicode]](http://www.unicode.org/webscripts/logo60s2.gif){kind=small}
