Languages Online: Scripts, Unicode and Emoji

The early internet was built mainly for English and the Latin alphabet, which made it harder for speakers of other languages to participate. The Unicode standard, first published in 1991, created a common way to encode the world's writing systems, from Arabic and Chinese to Cherokee, and now covers well over a hundred scripts. In 2010 the first internet domain names in non-Latin scripts, including Arabic, were introduced.

Wikipedia exists in more than 300 language editions, though content is uneven: some languages have millions of articles and others only a few hundred. By some measures, roughly half of web content is in English, far above its share of speakers. Emoji, designed by Shigetaka Kurita for a Japanese phone company in 1999, became standardized in Unicode in 2010 and now act as a shared visual language, though their meanings vary across cultures. Online language shows both globalization's diversity and its imbalances.