ICU 69 Released

Unicode® ICU 69 has just been released. ICU 69 incorporates updates to CLDR 39 locale data with its many additions and corrections. ICU 69 also includes significant improvements to formatting for measurement units and numbers, as well as many other bug fixes and enhancements.

ICU is a software library widely used by products and other libraries to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode Standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR).

For details, please see http://site.icu-project.org/download/69.

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Over 140,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages

Unicode CLDR Version 39 now available

Unicode CLDR version 39 is now available. Unicode CLDR provides key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages. CLDR data is used by all major software systems (including all mobile phones) for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages.

The scope of the data changes is small in this cycle, because there was no data submission phase. Instead the focus was on modernizing the Survey Tool software and preparing for data submission in the next release (v40). The data fixes in the release were confined to some global changes that are difficult to do during a submission cycle, and various other fixes.

However, there were some changes that could require implementations to adapt their code:

• There was a major change in how Norwegian is handled, in order to align the way that the language identifiers no, nb, and nn are used.
• The unit support from the last release was integrated into ICU, and some fixes resulting from that process were made to the measurement unit data.
• Quite a number of fixes are made to the specification, to clarify text or fix problems in keyboards, measurement units, locale identifiers, and a few other areas.

To find out more, see the CLDR 39 Release Note, which has details on accessing the data, charts of the changes, and necessary migration changes.

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Over 140,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages

CLDR v39 Beta 2

The CLDR v39 beta has reached specification freeze, so no further changes will be made to the CLDR specification (aka LDML) except for showstoppers. For more details please see the release page.

The CLDR v39 release is planned for 2021-Apr-07.

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Over 140,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages

Unicode CLDR v39 Alpha available for testing

The Unicode CLDR v39 Alpha is now available for testing. The alpha has already been integrated into the development version of ICU. While the scope of the changes is small in this cycle, there are some significant migration issues, so we would especially appreciate feedback from non-ICU consumers of CLDR data. Feedback can be filed at CLDR Tickets.

Unicode CLDR provides key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages. CLDR data is used by all major software systems (including all mobile phones) for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages.

CLDR v39 had no submission phase. Instead the focus was on modernizing the Survey Tool software, preparing for data submission in the next release (v40). The data fixes in the release were confined to some global changes that are too difficult to do during a submission cycle, and various other fixes. There was a major change in how Norwegian is handled, in order to align the way that the locale identifiers no, nb, and nn are used. The CLDR Github repo is changing the name of “master” branch to “main” branch. The unit support from the last release was integrated into ICU, and some fixes resulting from that process were made to the measurement unit data. Quite a number of fixes are made to the specification, to clarify text or fix problems in keyboards, measurement units, locale identifiers, and a few other areas.

The public beta (data and specification) is planned for 2021-Mar-24, with the release following on 2021-Apr-07.

To find out more, see the draft CLDR 39 Release Note, which has information on accessing the date, reviewing charts of the changes, and necessary migration changes.

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Over 140,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages