[Unicode Announcement] The Unicode Consortium Releases CLDR, Version 1.8

Mountain View, CA, March 17, 2009-The Unicode Consortium announced

today the release of the new version of the Unicode Common Locale Data

Repository (Unicode CLDR 1.8), providing key building blocks for

software to support the world's languages.

CLDR 1.8 contains data for 186 languages and 159 territories: 501

locales in all. Version 1.8 of the repository contains over 22% more

locale data than the previous release, with over 42,000 new or modified

data items from over 300 different contributors.

For this release, the Unicode Consortium partnered with ANLoc, the

African Network for Localization, a project sponsored by Canada's

International Development Research Centre (IDRC), to help extend modern

computing on the African continent. ANLoc's vision is to empower

Africans to participate in the digital age by enabling their languages

in computers. A sub-project of ANLoc, called Afrigen, focuses on

creating African locales.

The Afrigen-ANLoc project's mission is to create viable locale data for

at least 100 of the over 2000 languages spoken in Africa, and

incorporate the data into Unicode's CLDR project and OpenOffice.org.

Implementation of fundamental locale data within CLDR is a critical step

for providing computer applications that can be localized into these

African languages, thus reaching populations that have never before been

able to use their native languages on computers and mobile phones.

The Afrigen-ANLoc project selected approximately 200 candidate

languages, including all official languages recognized by a national

government and all languages with at least 500,000 native speakers.

Additional languages were incorporated when volunteers stepped forward.

Data was collected through the Afrigen-ANLoc project by native-speaking

volunteers around the world, entered via a web-based utility designed

specifically for this purpose, and then merged into the CLDR repository.

In all, over 150 volunteers gathered locale data for 72 African

languages, with data for 54 of those incorporated into the CLDR 1.8

release. 41 of these languages are completely new to the Unicode CLDR

project while 13 others existed in earlier versions of CLDR and were

enhanced with additional data. These languages are spoken in 26

countries across the entire African continent.

"The partnership with Afrigen has been a huge benefit for us," says John

Emmons, vice-chair of the Unicode CLDR technical committee and lead CLDR

engineer for IBM. "The Afrigen effort has allowed us to bring many new

languages on board that we wouldn't be able to do through our normal

process, while still maintaining the level of quality and consistency

that we require for every language."

For more information about Unicode CLDR 1.8, see

http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-1-8

The Afrigen-ANLoc data collection tool was developed by Louise

Berthilson of IT46 (http://www.unicode.org/contacts.html

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