Improvement is a constant process in information technology. Old techniques routinely pave way for new technologies and the entire IT world slowly but surely move in the new direction without making any fuss. It’s a scientific world that believes more in pure logic and reason than stick to tradition. A few years back XML had taken IT world to a storm, and now it seems it is the turn of Unicode. Unicode, essentially a data storage encoding standard, is a path breaking development that has forced people to break free of the language barriers and think as a global citizen. It has made co-existence of world’s most language in a single document, webpage, software or operating system possible. It is indeed the IT version of the process of globalization taking place in the economic world.

As Unicode consortium puts it, “Unicode provides a unique number for every character. No matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. It is a way to store data on the computer system, in the form of files, databases and applications. Since ‘data’ is the basic and central unit of a computer’s operations and most computer operations revolve around manipulation of data in different forms, introduction of Unicode is beginning to change the very methodology of how computers work.

If a computer supports Unicode encoding, theoretically, it has inbuilt support for all the languages of the world. This means, such a computer is already familiar with our very own Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati or Punjabi. To use these languages, all you need is to activate the inbuilt language support. Some people may argue that this was possible even with the old encoding standards such as ANSI and ASCII. Such multilingual support, however, was no more than superficial as data storage encodings were essentially in English. Language fonts were used to display this data as non-English, and that was it. Change the font and the data was gone. Unicode works in a different way. It stores and interprets your data in the same language it belongs to. It is not dependent on fonts to store and display multilingual data.

A Unicode font theoretically supports all languages of the world. This means, you can use Arial font to write text in Hindi as well in Arabic. You can create a Word document in 10 or 20 languages and develop a website which multilingual content. If you visit Unicode consortium’s website, you can see dozens of world’s languages coexisting on a single webpage.

Unicode is being adopted fast, and most new applications support this encoding standard. Operating systems such as Microsoft Windows 2000, XP and the above, new editions of Red Hat Linux, Mac OS X, Ubantu etc. have strong Unicode support. Most important IT companies of the world including Microsoft, IBM, HP, Apple, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Google, Yahoo etc. are adopting Unicode which has resulted in all major software solutions, programming languages, software development platforms, databases, search engines, portals and communication systems supporting the standard. This is creating world wide Unicode environment where no language of the world is alien to the other.