Michael Everson - Wikimedia 2011 hackathon in Berlin 087

Michael Everson (born January 9, 1963) is an American and Irish

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingui ...

, script encoder,

typesetter Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or ''glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other symbols).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random H ...

type designer Type design is the art and process of designing typefaces. This involves drawing each letterform using a consistent style. The basic concepts and design variables are described below. A typeface differs from other modes of graphic production su ...

and

publisher Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...

. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which he has published over a hundred books since 2006. His central area of expertise is with

writing system A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable for ...

s of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats for computer and digital media. In 2003 Rick McGowan said he was "probably the world's leading expert in the computer encoding of scripts" for his work to add a wide variety of

scripts Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of ha ...

and

characters Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

to the

Universal Character Set The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS, Unicode) is a standard set of characters defined by the international standard ISO/ IEC 10646, ''Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS)'' (plus amendments to that standard), ...

. Since 1993, he has written over two hundred proposals which have added thousands of characters to ISO/IEC 10646 and the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

standard; as of 2003, he was credited as the leading contributor of Unicode proposals.

Life

Everson was born in

Norristown, Pennsylvania Norristown is a municipality with home rule status and the county seat of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, United States, in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Located along the Schuylkill River, approximately from the Philadelphia city limi ...

, and moved to

Tucson, Arizona , "(at the) base of the black ill , nicknames = "The Old Pueblo", "Optics Valley", "America's biggest small town" , image_map = , mapsize = 260px , map_caption = Interactive ...

, at the age of 12. His interest in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien led him to study Old English and then other

Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, ...

. He read German, Spanish, and French for his

B.A. Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four ye ...

at the

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory. ...

(1985), and the History of Religions and

Indo-European linguistics Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. The goal of those engaged in these studies is to amass information about the hypothetical pro ...

for his M.A. at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a Normal school, teachers colle ...

(1988). In 1989, a former professor, Dr.

Marija Gimbutas Marija Gimbutas ( lt, Marija Gimbutienė, ; January 23, 1921 – February 2, 1994) was a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of " Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis ...

, asked him to read a paper on Basque mythology at an Indo-Europeanist Conference held in Ireland; shortly thereafter he moved to

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 ...

, where he studied as a

Fulbright Scholar The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people o ...

in the Faculty of

Celtic Studies Celtic studies or Celtology is the academic discipline occupied with the study of any sort of cultural output relating to the Celtic-speaking peoples (i.e. speakers of Celtic languages). This ranges from linguistics, literature and art histo ...

University College Dublin University College Dublin (commonly referred to as UCD) ( ga, Coláiste na hOllscoile, Baile Átha Cliath) is a public research university in Dublin, Ireland, and a collegiate university, member institution of the National University of Ireland ...

(1991). He became a

naturalized Naturalization (or naturalisation) is the legal act or process by which a non-citizen of a country may acquire citizenship or nationality of that country. It may be done automatically by a statute, i.e., without any effort on the part of the i ...

Irish citizen in 2000, although he retains American citizenship.

Work

Everson is active in supporting minority-language communities, especially in the fields of

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

standardization Standardization or standardisation is the process of implementing and developing technical standards based on the consensus of different parties that include firms, users, interest groups, standards organizations and governments. Standardization ...

and

internationalization In economics, internationalization or internationalisation is the process of increasing involvement of enterprises in international markets, although there is no agreed definition of internationalization. Internationalization is a crucial strateg ...

. In addition to being one of the primary contributing editors of the Unicode Standard, he is also a contributing editor to ISO/IEC 10646, registrar for

ISO 15924 ISO 15924, ''Codes for the representation of names of scripts'', is an international standard defining codes for writing systems or ''scripts'' (a "set of graphic characters used for the written form of one or more languages"). Each script is give ...

, and subtag reviewer for

BCP 47 An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code or tag that is used to identify human languages in the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in ''Best Current Practice (BCP) 47''; the su ...

. He has contributed to the encoding of many scripts and

in those standards, receiving the Unicode

Bulldog Award Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, whi ...

in 2000 for his technical contributions to the development and promotion of the Unicode Standard. In 2004, Everson was appointed convenor of ISO TC46/WG3 (Conversion of Written Languages), which is responsible for

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or ...

standards. Everson is one of the co-editors (along with Rick McGowan, Ken Whistler, and V.S. Umamaheswaran) of the Unicode roadmaps that detail actual and proposed allocations for current and future Unicode scripts and blocks. On July 1, 2012, Everson was appointed to the

Volapük Academy Volapük (; , "Language of the World", or lit. "World Speak") is a constructed language created between 1879 and 1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Catholic priest in Baden, Germany, who believed that God had told him in a dream to create an in ...

by the

Cifal The CIFAL Global Network is part of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). The Network comprises 25 International Training Centres (CIFALs) and aims to serve as a platform for capacity-building of government authorities a ...

, Brian R. Bishop, for his work in

Volapük Volapük (; , "Language of the World", or lit. "World Speak") is a constructed language created between 1879 and 1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Catholic priest in Baden, Germany, who believed that God had told him in a dream to create an in ...

publishing.

Encoding of scripts

Everson has been actively involved in the encoding of many scripts in the Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 standards, including

Avestan Avestan (), or historically Zend, is an umbrella term for two Old Iranian languages: Old Avestan (spoken in the 2nd millennium BCE) and Younger Avestan (spoken in the 1st millennium BCE). They are known only from their conjoined use as the scri ...

, Balinese,

Bamum Bamum, also spelled Bamoum, Bamun, or Bamoun, may refer to: *The Bamum people *The Bamum kingdom *The Bamum language *The Bamum script The Bamum scripts are an evolutionary series of six scripts created for the Bamum language by Ibrahim Njoya, ...

, Bassa Vah,

Batak Batak is a collective term used to identify a number of closely related Austronesian ethnic groups predominantly found in North Sumatra, Indonesia, who speak Batak languages. The term is used to include the Karo, Pakpak, Simalungun, Toba, ...

Braille Braille (Pronounced: ) is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired, including people who are blind, deafblind or who have low vision. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille display ...

, Brāhmī, Buginese, Buhid,

Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics Canadian syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of writing systems used in a number of Indigenous Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Inuit, and (formerly) Athabaskan language families. These languages had no formal writing sy ...

, Carian,

Cham Cham or CHAM may refer to: Ethnicities and languages *Chams, people in Vietnam and Cambodia **Cham language, the language of the Cham people ***Cham script *** Cham (Unicode block), a block of Unicode characters of the Cham script *Cham Albania ...

Cherokee The Cherokee (; chr, ᎠᏂᏴᏫᏯᎢ, translit=Aniyvwiyaʔi or Anigiduwagi, or chr, ᏣᎳᎩ, links=no, translit=Tsalagi) are one of the indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, th ...

, Coptic,

Cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo- syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedg ...

Cypriot Cypriot (in older sources often "Cypriote") refers to someone or something of, from, or related to the country of Cyprus. * Cypriot people, or of Cypriot descent; this includes: ** Armenian Cypriots ** Greek Cypriots ** Maronite Cypriots ** Tur ...

, Deseret, Duployan,

Egyptian hieroglyphs Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1, ...

Elbasan Elbasan ( ; sq-definite, Elbasani ) is the fourth most populous city of Albania and seat of Elbasan County and Elbasan Municipality. It lies to the north of the river Shkumbin between the Skanderbeg Mountains and the Myzeqe Plain in central ...

, Ethiopic, Georgian,

Glagolitic The Glagolitic script (, , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed to have been created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzan ...

Gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...

, Hanunóo,

Imperial Aramaic Imperial Aramaic is a linguistic term, coined by modern scholars in order to designate a specific historical variety of Aramaic language. The term is polysemic, with two distinctive meanings, wider (sociolinguistic) and narrower ( dialectologic ...

Inscriptional Pahlavi Inscriptional Pahlavi is the earliest attested form of Pahlavi scripts, and is evident in clay fragments that have been dated to the reign of Mithridates I (''r.'' 171–138 BC). Other early evidence includes the Pahlavi inscriptions of Arsacid ...

, Inscriptional Parthian, Javanese, Kayah Li, Khmer, Lepcha,

Limbu Limbu may refer to: * Limbu people, an indigenous tribe living in Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan ** Rambahadur Limbu (born 1939), Nepalese Gurkha recipient of the Victoria Cross * Limbu language * Limbu script ** Limbu (Unicode block) Limbu is a Unicod ...

Linear A Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 to 1450 BC to write the hypothesized Minoan language or languages. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civi ...

, Linear B, Lycian, Lydian, Mandaic,

Manichaean Manichaeism (; in New Persian ; ) is a former major religionR. van den Broek, Wouter J. Hanegraaff ''Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times''SUNY Press, 1998 p. 37 founded in the 3rd century AD by the Parthian prophet Mani (A ...

Meitei Mayek ) , altname = , type = Abugida , languages = Meitei language (officially known as Manipuri language) , region = * Manipur , sample = "Meitei Mayek" (literally meaning "Meitei script" in Meitei language) written ...

, Mongolian,

Myanmar Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John Wells explai ...

Nabataean The Nabataeans or Nabateans (; Nabataean Aramaic: , , vocalized as ; Arabic: , , singular , ; compare grc, Ναβαταῖος, translit=Nabataîos; la, Nabataeus) were an ancient Arab people who inhabited northern Arabia and the southern Le ...

, New Tai Lue,

N'Ko N'Ko () is a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949, as a modern writing system for the Mandé languages of West Africa. The term ''N'Ko'', which means ''I say'' in all Mandé languages, is also used for the Mandé literary standard writt ...

Ogham Ogham (Modern Irish: ; mga, ogum, ogom, later mga, ogam, label=none ) is an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the early Irish language (in the "orthodox" inscriptions, 4th to 6th centuries AD), and later the Old Irish langua ...

Ol Chiki The Ol Chiki () script, also known as Ol Chemetʼ (Santali: ''ol'' 'writing', ''chemet'' 'learning'), Ol Ciki, Ol, and sometimes as the Santali alphabet invented by Pandit Raghunath Murmu in the year 1925, is the official writing system for San ...

, Old Hungarian, Old Italic, Old North Arabian,

Old Persian Old Persian is one of the two directly attested Old Iranian languages (the other being Avestan) and is the ancestor of Middle Persian (the language of Sasanian Empire). Like other Old Iranian languages, it was known to its native speakers as ( ...

Old South Arabian Old South Arabian (or Ṣayhadic or Yemenite) is a group of four closely related extinct languages spoken in the far southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula. They were written in the Ancient South Arabian script. There were a number of ot ...

Old Turkic Old Turkic (also East Old Turkic, Orkhon Turkic language, Old Uyghur) is the earliest attested form of the Turkic languages, found in Göktürk and Uyghur Khaganate inscriptions dating from about the eighth to the 13th century. It is the ...

, Osmanya, Palmyrene, Phaistos Disc, Phoenician, Rejang,

Runic Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised ...

, Samaritan, Saurashtra, Shavian, Sinhala, Sundanese,

Tagalog Tagalog may refer to: Language * Tagalog language, a language spoken in the Philippines ** Old Tagalog, an archaic form of the language ** Batangas Tagalog, a dialect of the language * Tagalog script, the writing system historically used for Tagal ...

Tagbanwa The Tagbanwa people ( Tagbanwa: ) are one of the oldest ethnic groups in the Philippines, and can be mainly found in the central and northern Palawan. Research has shown that the Tagbanwa are possible descendants of the Tabon Man, thus making th ...

, Tai Le, Tai Tham,

Thaana Thaana, Taana or Tāna ( ) is the present writing system of the Maldivian language spoken in the Maldives. Thaana has characteristics of both an abugida (diacritic, vowel-killer strokes) and a true alphabet (all vowels are written), w ...

, Tibetan,

Ugaritic Ugaritic () is an extinct Northwest Semitic language, classified by some as a dialect of the Amorite language and so the only known Amorite dialect preserved in writing. It is known through the Ugaritic texts discovered by French archaeolog ...

, Vai, and Yi, as well as many characters belonging to the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power ...

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

, Cyrillic, and

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walte ...

scripts.

Encoding of symbols

Everson authored or co-authored proposals for many symbol characters for encoding into Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646. Among those proposals submitted to

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 Coded character sets is a standardization subcommittee of the Joint Technical Committee ISO/IEC JTC 1 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), that deve ...

/WG 2 that have been accepted and encoded: N2586R ( and four other miscellaneous symbols admitted into Unicode 4.1), N3727 (the 26 Regional Indicator Symbols used in pairs to generate national flags in

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed convers ...

contexts; adopted into Unicode 6.0), and N4783R2 (

chess notation Chess notation systems are used to record either the moves made or the position of the pieces in a game of chess. Chess notation is used in chess literature, and by players keeping a record of an ongoing game. The earliest systems of notation used ...

symbols encoded into Unicode 11.0). Among proposals that have not yet been approved for encoding: N1866 (an early proposal for encoding Blissymbols into the Supplementary Multilingual Plane of Unicode; still listed in the SMP roadmap as of Unicode 11.0 although no further action had been taken on it for years) and N4784R (heterodox chess symbols for use in variant games like fairy chess). Everson, along with

Doug Ewell The Ewellic script (pronounced ''yoo-WELL-ik'') was invented by Doug Ewell in 1980 as a way to represent the pronunciation of English and other languages without the precision of the International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phone ...

Rebecca Bettencourt The ConScript Unicode Registry is a discontinued volunteer project to coordinate the assignment of code points in the Unicode Private Use Areas (PUA) for the encoding of artificial scripts including those for constructed languages. It was founded by ...

, Ricardo Bánffy, Eduardo Marín Silva, Elias Mårtenson, Mark Shoulson, Shawn Steele, and Rebecca Turner, is a contributor to the Terminals Working Group researching obscure characters found in legacy

character set Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

s used by home computers (or "microcomputers"), terminals, and other legacy devices made from the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s; their latest effort, proposal L2/19-025, includes 214 graphic characters for compatibility with

MSX MSX is a standardized home computer architecture, announced by Microsoft and ASCII Corporation on June 16, 1983. It was initially conceived by Microsoft as a product for the Eastern sector, and jointly marketed by Kazuhiko Nishi, then vice-p ...

, Commodore 64, and other microcomputers of the era, as well as

Teletext A British Ceefax football index page from October 2009, showing the three-digit page numbers for a variety of football news stories Teletext, or broadcast teletext, is a standard for displaying text and rudimentary graphics on suitably equipp ...

Font development

In 1995 he designed the

Unicode font A Unicode font is a computer font that maps glyphs to code points defined in the Unicode Standard. The vast majority of modern computer fonts use Unicode mappings, even those fonts which only include glyphs for a single writing system, or even only ...

, Everson Mono, a

monospaced A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spaci ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands ...

with more than 4,800 characters. This font was the third Unicode-encoded font to contain a large number of characters from many character blocks, after Lucida Sans Unicode and

Unihan font Unihan font was developed by Ross Paterson in 1993. Unihan font had two variations, 16×16 and 24×24 bitmap fonts. These covered most of the CJK Auxiliary and Unihan portions of Unicode 1.1. Font files were in HBF (and bin) format ( BDF). Th ...

(both 1993). In 2007 he was commissioned by the International Association of Coptic Studies to create a standard free Unicode 5.1 font for Coptic, ''Antinoou'', using the Sahidic style.

Conscript Unicode Registry

Together with

John Cowan John Cowan (born August 24, 1953) is an American soul music and progressive bluegrass vocalist and bass guitar player. He was the lead vocalist and bass player for the New Grass Revival. Cowan became the band's bassist in 1972 after the departure ...

, he is also responsible for the ConScript Unicode Registry, a project to coordinate the mapping of artificial scripts into the Unicode

Private Use Area In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the Unicode Consortium. Three private use areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearl ...

. Among the scripts "encoded" in the CSUR, Shavian and Deseret were eventually formally adopted into Unicode; two other conscripts under consideration are

Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (, ; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings''. From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlins ...

's scripts of

Tengwar The Tengwar script is an artificial script, one of several scripts created by J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of ''The Lord of the Rings''. Within the fictional context of Middle-earth, the Tengwar were invented by the Elf Fëanor, and used ...

and

Cirth The Cirth (, meaning "runes"; sg. certh ) is a semi‑ artificial script, based on real‑life runic alphabets, one of several scripts invented by J. R. R. Tolkien for the constructed languages he devised and used in his works. ''Cirth'' is ...

Language and locale information

Everson has also created locale and language information for many languages, from support for the

Irish language Irish (an Caighdeán Oifigiúil, Standard Irish: ), also known as Gaelic, is a Goidelic languages, Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European lang ...

and the other

Celtic languages The Celtic languages (usually , but sometimes ) are a group of related languages descended from Proto-Celtic. They form a branch of the Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edwar ...

to the

minority Minority may refer to: Politics * Minority government, formed when a political party does not have a majority of overall seats in parliament * Minority leader, in American politics, the floor leader of the second largest caucus in a legislative b ...

Languages of Finland. In 2000, together with Trond Trosterud, he co-authored Software localization into Nynorsk Norwegian, a report commissioned by the

Norwegian Language Council The Language Council of Norway ( no, Språkrådet, ) is the consultative body of the Norwegian state on language issues. It was established in 2005 and replaced the Norwegian Language Council (, ) which existed from 1974 to 2005. It is a subsidiar ...

. In 2003 he was commissioned by the

United Nations Development Programme The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)french: Programme des Nations unies pour le développement, PNUD is a United Nations agency tasked with helping countries eliminate poverty and achieve sustainable economic growth and human dev ...

to prepare a report on the computer locale requirements for the major languages of

Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bord ...

(

Pashto Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani (). Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official languag ...

Dari Dari (, , ), also known as Dari Persian (, ), is the variety of the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan. Dari is the term officially recognised and promoted since 1964 by the Afghan government for the Persian language,Lazard, G.Darī ...

, and Uzbek), co-authored by Roozbeh Pournader, which was endorsed by the Ministry of Communications of the Afghan Transitional Islamic Administration. More recently,

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. I ...

's Initiative B@bel funded Everson's work to encode the

and Balinese scripts.

Work on a standard for Cornish

In 2007 he co-authored a proposal for a new standard written form of Cornish, called Kernowek Standard. Following the publication of the

Standard Written Form The Standard Written Form or SWF ( kw, Furv Skrifys Savonek) of the Cornish language is an orthography standard that is designed to "provide public bodies and the educational system with a universally acceptable, inclusive, and neutral orthograph ...

in 2008, Everson and a group of other users examined the specification and implemented a set of modifications to it, publishing a formal specification in 2012.

Publishing at Evertype

Everson operates a publishing company, Evertype, through which he has published total of 295 books, these include a wide range of titles by various authors and editors, with Everson himself as co-author of one, editor of several, and having adapted or revised several more. He also designed fonts for several. Everson has a particular interest in

Gaelic type Gaelic type (sometimes called Irish character, Irish type, or Gaelic script) is a family of Insular script typefaces devised for printing Classical Gaelic. It was widely used from the 16th until the mid-18th century (Scotland) or the mid-20th ...

face design, and does a considerable amount of work

typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other symbols).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random ...

books in Irish for publication by Evertype. Another project consists of his publications of translations of ''

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (commonly ''Alice in Wonderland'') is an 1865 English novel by Lewis Carroll. It details the story of a young girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatur ...

'' in many languages, amongst which are

minority language A minority language is a language spoken by a minority of the population of a territory. Such people are termed linguistic minorities or language minorities. With a total number of 196 sovereign states recognized internationally (as of 2019) an ...

s and

constructed language A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction ...

s. Translations are available in Cornish,

Esperanto Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communi ...

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

, Hawaiian, Irish, Italian,

Jèrriais (french: Jersiais, also known as the Jersey Language, Jersey French and Jersey Norman French in English) is a Romance language and the traditional language of the Jersey people. It is a form of the Norman language spoken in Jersey, an island ...

, Ladino,

, Lingua Franca Nova, Lingwa de planeta,

Low German : : : : : (70,000) (30,000) (8,000) , familycolor = Indo-European , fam2 = Germanic , fam3 = West Germanic , fam4 = North Sea Germanic , ancestor = Old Saxon , ancestor2 = Middle ...

Manx Manx (; formerly sometimes spelled Manks) is an adjective (and derived noun) describing things or people related to the Isle of Man: * Manx people **Manx surnames * Isle of Man It may also refer to: Languages * Manx language, also known as Manx ...

Mennonite Low German Plautdietsch () or Mennonite Low German is a Low Prussian dialect of East Low German with Dutch influence that developed in the 16th and 17th centuries in the Vistula delta area of Royal Prussia. The word ''Plautdietsch'' translates to "flat (o ...

, Borain Picard, Sambahsa,

Scots Scots usually refers to something of, from, or related to Scotland, including: * Scots language, a language of the West Germanic language family native to Scotland * Scots people, a nation and ethnic group native to Scotland * Scoti, a Latin na ...

, Shavian transliteration,

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

Ulster Scots Ulster Scots, may refer to: * Ulster Scots people * Ulster Scots dialect Ulster Scots or Ulster-Scots (', ga, Albainis Uladh), also known as Ulster Scotch and Ullans, is the dialect of Scots language, Scots spoken in parts of Ulster in North ...

and

Welsh Welsh may refer to: Related to Wales * Welsh, referring or related to Wales * Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales * Welsh people People * Welsh (surname) * Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peopl ...

, with several other translations being prepared.

References

External links

Evertype.com
Michael Everson's website *

by Dick Gordon on '' The Connection'', a

National Public Radio National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from othe ...

public affairs call-in program
Dork Forest interview
by

Jackie Kashian Jackie Kashian (born July 20, 1965) is an American stand-up comedian. Early life and career Kashian, who is of Armenian and Irish descent, was born in South Milwaukee, Wisconsin and raised by her father, Elliot, and her stepmother, Nancy, along ...

, 2012-09-18 * {{DEFAULTSORT:Everson, Michael 1963 births Living people American emigrants to Ireland Children's book publishers Cornish language revival Irish typographers and type designers Lewis Carroll Linguists from the Republic of Ireland People from Norristown, Pennsylvania People involved with Unicode Irish publishers (people) University of Arizona alumni University of California, Los Angeles alumni Volapükologists Fulbright alumni