Unicode® ICU 72 has just been released. ICU is the premier library for software internationalization, used by a wide array of companies and organizations to support the world's languages, implementing both the latest version of the Unicode Standard and of the Unicode locale data (CLDR). ICU 72 updates to Unicode 15, and to CLDR 42 locale data with various additions and corrections.

ICU 72 and CLDR 42 are major releases, including a new version of Unicode and major locale data improvements.

ICU 72 adds two technology preview implementations based on draft Unicode specifications:

• Formatting of people’s names in multiple languages (CLDR background on why this feature is being added and what it does)
• An enhanced version of message formatting

This release also updates to the time zone data version 2022e (2022-oct). Note that pre-1970 data for a number of time zones has been removed, as has been the case in the upstream tzdata release since 2021b.

For details, please see https://icu.unicode.org/download/72.

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Over 144,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages

The repertoire for Unicode 15.0 is now open for early review and comment. During alpha review the repertoire is reasonably mature and stable, but is not yet completely locked down. Discussion regarding whether certain characters should be removed from the repertoire for publication is welcome. Character names and code point assignments are reasonably firm, but suggestions for improvement may still be entertained.

This early review is provided so that reviewers may consider the character repertoire issues prior to the start of beta review (currently scheduled to start in late May, 2022). Once beta review begins, the repertoire, code points, and character names will all be locked down, and no longer be subject to changes.

Feedback for the alpha review should be reported under PRI #442 using the Unicode contact form by April 5, 2022.

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