Universal Scripts Project

FAIN: PR-50004-07

University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)
Deborah Winthrop Anderson (Project Director: July 2006 to December 2009)

Incorporation into the Unicode standard of 15 historical and minority language scripts.

Although computer users in many parts of the world can now communicate using their own native writing systems, there are still at least 40 linguistic minority scripts, and about 40 more scripts of historical importance, that are difficult or impossible to use because they are not yet part of the international character encoding standard, known as Unicode. And because continued corporate interest and support for these scripts is uncertain, communication among the groups who use them, and long-term access to their written cultural and historical resources, is threatened. This project will fund proposals to adopt 9 modern and 6 historical scripts into the standard, and will foster collaboration among scholars, users, and institutions to continue working on more proposals, so that computers will ultimately support all the world's scripts.