Not Just Emoji

Every programmer knows about Unicode. Most other people have no idea
what it is, even though they use Unicode every day. Every character you
type on your smartphone or laptop --- and every character you read ---
is defined by the Unicode Consortium
<http://www.unicode.org/standard/standard.html>.

The awareness of the Unicode Consortium has grown recently, with the
spread of emoji. But from the news articles, it's easy to get the
impression that emoji is the only thing we do. In reality, there are
over 120,000 characters defined, and as you see below, only a small
fraction of them are emoji.

Emoji and Non-Emoji

For example, this June
<http://blog.unicode.org/2016/03/unicode-90-beta-review_10.html> we'll
be adding 7,500 characters --- and of those new characters, fewer than
1% of them are emoji. The majority of the characters are from 6 new
scripts: some in modern use, and some historic.

CLDR <http://cldr.unicode.org/> is the other main project for the
Unicode Consortium <http://www.unicode.org/consortium/consort.html>. It
provides the building blocks for supporting a variety of different
languages. We've just released CLDR v29
<http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-29>, and are about to
start data submission for v30
<http://cldr.unicode.org/index/survey-tool>. Especially if you are a
native speaker of a "digitally disadvantaged" language, we encourage you
to join the other contributors to CLDR
<http://cldr.unicode.org/index/acknowledgments> to help with this effort.

The Unicode Consortium is a volunteer-driven 501(c)(3) non-profit
organization. Some people may work on emoji, while others work on
ancient scripts, or Chinese ideographs. Others work on the language
support in CLDR <http://cldr.unicode.org/>, or other projects.

AAC Animation
<http://www.unicode.org/consortium/adopted-characters.html>

*Sponsors* <http://www.unicode.org/consortium/adopt-a-character.html>

You can help fund the work of the consortium --- even if you don't
contribute technically --- by adopting your favorite character through
the Adopt A Character
<http://www.unicode.org/consortium/adopt-a-character.html> program.

--- Mark Davis, President

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