Soon the whole world could get Chinese New Year emoji

Photo credit: @ken_lunde.

Right in the middle of the Chinese New Year holiday comes some good news for emoji fans the world over: you may soon be able to celebrate CNY with emoji. The next version of Unicode, Unicode 11, won’t be finalized until later this year, but there are already three Chinese-holiday-themed emoji recommended for inclusion. The red envelope and firecracker emoji will be great for celebrating Chinese New Year, and the mooncake emoji will help highlight another important Chinese holiday: Mid-Autumn Festival.

There are already plenty of apps out there with Chinese-holiday-themed stickers and emoji, of course. But these three, if they’re confirmed and added to Unicode 11 later this year, would be available worldwide across a large variety of apps and platforms. Unicode is the international standard for character encoding, so their inclusion with Unicode would make them nearly universal.

Currently, Unicode includes thousands of emoji, including many for Western holidays (there are ten different Santa-related options, for example). But there is virtually nothing related to traditional Chinese holidays, so the addition of these three new emoji would be a significant step towards inclusiveness in Unicode’s stable.

The recommendation of these three characters for inclusion in the next version of Unicode was headline news on China’s tech blogs (although admittedly, there isn’t much competition for headline space during the Spring Festival holiday).

This post Soon the whole world could get Chinese New Year emoji appeared first on Tech in Asia.

from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/world-chinese-year-emoji
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