How Your Donations are Used

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit 501(c)(3) charitable organization and donations help to support its vital work—making modern software and computing systems support the widest range of human languages. Donors at the Bronze, Silver and Gold levels receive special recognition on our Donations page. Your donations are used to improve language support and to preserve linguistic heritage.

There are approximately 7,000 living human languages, with varying levels of vitality. Less than 100 of these languages are well-supported on computers, mobile phones, and other devices, while all the rest risk being digitally disadvantaged. For more information, see Language Support Levels.

Linguistic Heritage

One of the goals of the Consortium is to preserve humanity's common linguistic heritage and provide universal access for the world's languages—past, present, and future. The Consortium lays the groundwork to enable universal access by encoding the characters for the world’s languages, and assigning the many properties required for use on computers. For complex scripts, the work also entails developing the model required for interactions between characters. Your donations can help:

• Fund travel, so script proposal authors, members of the user community, and experts can meet. Such meetings are key to resolving issues of character encodings for minority and historic scripts.
  
• Fund the development of fonts, keyboards and input methods for under-resourced languages

Language Support

Another vital goal of the Consortium is to provide the necessary data that allows languages to be supported on computers and mobile devices. Your donations can help:

• Improve the collection and organization of information about languages
• Fund the infastructure we use to support data entry and verification
• Fund development of mobile applications for language information collection, targeted at developing countries with limited internet access, thus helping bridge the digital divide

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