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Emoji may have helped popularize support for Unicode characters outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane (The first 2¹⁶ code points in Unicode), because all but

Emoji may have helped popularize support for Unicode characters outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane (The first 2¹⁶ code points in Unicode), because all but a few fall outside of it. Before emoji any code point outside of the BMP tended to have a niche audience. When I wrote my master's thesis in 2009, support for non-BMP characters was still sketchy (although XeLaTeX and PDF-viewer Evince could handle them neatly on the Linux desktop). I doubt that emoji helped further popularize Unicode in Europe, because in my experience (anecdotal of course) developers were already well aware of the benefits of Unicode (and UTF-8 in particular for the web) before emoji got adopted from Japanese telephones and embraced en-masse. I suspect that in Europe the need for Unicode arose sooner. For Dutch for example; with the introduction of ISO-8859-15 in 1999 (subtly different from ISO-8859-1) you now often had two character encoding standards in mixed use for a single language, and when you had to render documents with names of people from various countries, things just got confusing (in the US diacritics tend to get dropped instead). UTF-8 offered a clean break from this. It seems plausible that emoji may have helped Americans break the remnants of the ASCII barrier though.

Manishearth 10y ago
(where "niche audience" includes speakers of the most spoken language in the world, but I assume you're talking about the West specifically)
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  I was under the assumption that for the average Chinese speaker the Basic Multilingual Plane sufficed. Chinese characters (as used in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese) were certainly added beyond the BMP as well (the CJK Unified Ideographps Extensions), but to my knowledge these all tend to be rather rare (think characters from Buddhist sutras, linguistic research, historical use, et cetera, but also from names not yet provided for in the BMP).
  - Manishearth 10y ago
    Huh. IIRC they're a bit more common than that, but yes, not very common. Or perhaps you're just talking about Chinese where I'm also considering Kanji and others. Which isn't from the most spoken language in the world, but still, top 10!
    - Freak_NL 10y ago
      Actually for Japanese in particular the extended CJK ranges are of limited use (I'm more familiar with Japanese than Chinese), although they do contain the parts of JIS X 0213 that were still missing from Unicode (all of them rare characters) and some ideographical component parts that are useful for dictionary and educational software. With the latter you can for example use Unicode codepoints for the distinct components of a single Chinese character (e.g., 𠂉 as the top-right part of 族). That is a fairly specialised use though. For Korean and Vietnamese the extra Chinese characters might apply to ancient names (geographical usually I would wager), but neither language has a lot of ideographs in modern usage. It's certainly an interesting topic though.

Manishearth 10y ago

(where "niche audience" includes speakers of the most spoken language in the world, but I assume you're talking about the West specifically)

Freak_NL 10y ago
I was under the assumption that for the average Chinese speaker the Basic Multilingual Plane sufficed. Chinese characters (as used in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese) were certainly added beyond the BMP as well (the CJK Unified Ideographps Extensions), but to my knowledge these all tend to be rather rare (think characters from Buddhist sutras, linguistic research, historical use, et cetera, but also from names not yet provided for in the BMP).
- Manishearth 10y ago
  Huh. IIRC they're a bit more common than that, but yes, not very common. Or perhaps you're just talking about Chinese where I'm also considering Kanji and others. Which isn't from the most spoken language in the world, but still, top 10!
  - Freak_NL 10y ago
    Actually for Japanese in particular the extended CJK ranges are of limited use (I'm more familiar with Japanese than Chinese), although they do contain the parts of JIS X 0213 that were still missing from Unicode (all of them rare characters) and some ideographical component parts that are useful for dictionary and educational software. With the latter you can for example use Unicode codepoints for the distinct components of a single Chinese character (e.g., 𠂉 as the top-right part of 族). That is a fairly specialised use though. For Korean and Vietnamese the extra Chinese characters might apply to ancient names (geographical usually I would wager), but neither language has a lot of ideographs in modern usage. It's certainly an interesting topic though.