title: CLDR 46 Release Note

CLDR 46 Release Note

No.DateRel. NoteDataChartsSpecDeltaGitHub TagDelta DTDCLDR JSON
462024-10-XXv46CLDR46Charts46LDML46Δ46release-46ΔDtd4646.0.0-BETA2

This is a beta version of CLDR v46.

The data is available at release-46-beta2, and the specification is available at tr35/proposed.html. Feedback is welcome via tickets. (The CLDR site is undergoing a migration to Markdown, so the UI for navigation is temporary.)

Overview

Unicode CLDR provides key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages. CLDR data is used by all major software systems (including all mobile phones) for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages.

The most significant changes in this release were:

  • Updates to Unicode 16.0 (including major changes to collation)
  • Further revisions to the Message Format 2.0 tech preview
  • Substantial additions and modifications of Emoji search keyword data
  • ‘Upleveling’ the locale coverage
  • Important changes to the specification

For more details, see below.

Locale Coverage Status

Current Levels

CountLevelUsageExamples
97ModernSuitable for full UI internationalizationčeština, Ελληνικά‎, Беларуская‎, ‎ᏣᎳᎩ‎, Ქართული‎, ‎Հայերեն‎, ‎עברית‎, ‎اردو‎, አማርኛ‎, ‎नेपाली‎, অসমীয়া‎, ‎বাংলা‎, ‎ਪੰਜਾਬੀ‎, ‎ગુજરાતી‎, ‎ଓଡ଼ିଆ‎, தமிழ்‎, ‎తెలుగు‎, ‎ಕನ್ನಡ‎, ‎മലയാളം‎, ‎සිංහල‎, ‎ไทย‎, ‎ລາວ‎, မြန်မာ‎, ‎ខ្មែរ‎, ‎한국어‎, 中文, 日本語‎, … ‎
16ModerateSuitable for “document content” internationalization, eg. in spreadsheetAkan, Balóchi [Látin], brezhoneg, Cebuano, føroyskt, IsiXhosa, Māori, sardu, veneto, Wolof, татар, тоҷикӣ, कांगड़ी‎, …
55BasicSuitable for locale selection, eg. choice of language on mobile phoneBasa Sunda, emakhuwa, Esperanto, eʋegbe, Frysk, Malti, босански (ћирилица), କୁୱି (ଅଡ଼ିଆ), కువి (తెలుగు), ᱥᱟᱱᱛᱟᱲᱤ, ᓀᐦᐃᓇᐍᐏᐣ‬, ꆈꌠꉙ‎, …

Changes

±New LevelLocales
📈ModernNigerian Pidgin, Tigrinya
📈ModerateAkan, Baluchi (Latin), Kangri, Tajik, Tatar, Wolof
📈BasicEwe, Ga, Kinyarwanda, Konkani (Latin), Northern Sotho, Oromo, Sichuan Yi, Southern Sotho, Tswana
📉Basic*Chuvash, Anii

* Note: Each release, the number of items needed for Modern and Moderate increases. So locales without active contributors may drop down in coverage level.

For a full listing, see Coverage Levels

Specification Changes

The following are the most significant changes to the specification (LDML).

  1. Message Format — see a summary below
  2. LDML Conformance
  3. emoji search keywords in tech preview — see a summary below
  4. semantic skeletons
  5. Grouping classes of characters and other collation changes — see a summary below

There are many more changes that are important to implementations, such as changes to certain identifier syntax and various algorithms. See the Modifications section of the specification for details.

Data Changes

DTD Changes

  1. Added alt='official' to represent cases where an official value differs from the customary value. Currently added for a small number of language names, decimal separators, and grouping separators.
  2. Added new numbering systems from Unicode 16.0.

For a full listing, see Delta DTDs.

Supplemental Data Changes

  1. Currency
    1. New currency code ZWG added — because it was late in the cycle, many locales will just support the code (no symbol or name).
  2. Dates & Times
    1. Added a new calendar type, iso8601. This is not the same as the ISO 8601 standard format, which is designed just for data interchange: it is all ASCII, doesn't have all the options for fields (like “Sunday”, “BC”, or “AM”), and does not contain spaces. The CLDR iso8601 calendar uses patterns in the order: era, year, month, day, day-of-week, hour, minute, second, day-period, timezone
    2. Changed the metazone for Kazakhstan to reflect removal of Asia/Almaty, thus dropping the distinction among different regions in Kazakhstan.
    3. Added support for deprecated timezone codes by remapping: CST6CDT → America/Chicago, EST → America/Panama, EST5EDT → America/New_York, MST7MDT → America/Denver, PST8PDT → America/Los_Angeles.
  3. Units
    1. Added units: portion-per-1e9 (aka per-billion), night (for hotel stays), light-speed (as an internal prefix for light-second, light-minute, etc.)
    2. Changed preferred wind speed preference for some locales to meter-per-second. More preference changes are planned for the next release.
  4. Minimization for likelySubtags removes many additional redundant mappings.
    • For example, the mapping acy_Grek → acy_Grek_CY is unnecessary, because the mapping acy → acy_Latn_CY is sufficient. For the reason why, see the algorithm in Likely Subtags.
    • The ordering in the file is more consistent; first the main mappings, then the mapping from region and/or script to likely language, then the data contributed by SIL.
    • The regions have been cleaned up: there are no entries with ZZ, and 001 is limited to artifical languages such as Interlingua. The only other macroregion code is in und_419 → es_Latn_419 (Spanish‧Latin‧Latin America)
  5. Language matching
    • Dropped the fallback mapping desired="uk" → supported="ru" (so that Ukrainian (uk) doesn't fall back to Russian (ru)).
      • Note: A fallback language is used when the user‘s primary language is unavailable, and either the user doesn’t have any secondaries language in their settings (as on Android or iOS) or those secondary languages are also not available. As a result of this change, when the primary and secondary languages are not available, the fallback language would be the system default instead of Russian.
    • Added the mapping desired="scn" → supported="it" (Sicilian → Italian).
    • Changed the deprecated code Goan Konkani (gom) to Konkani (kok).
  6. Transforms
    1. Major update to Han → Latn, reflecting new data in Unicode 16.0
    2. Fixes for Arabic numbers, and a Farsi vowel
  7. Other Unicode 16.0 changes
    1. Additional numbering systems
    2. Additional scripts and script identifiers
    3. ScriptMeta has been expanded for Unicode 16.0
  8. Other updates
    1. The subdivision identifiers have been updated to the latest available from ISO
      • The removed identifiers have been deprecated
      • Missing names have been added (from Wikidata)
    2. The language subtags, script subtags, and variant subtags have been updated to the latest from IANA
      • Some codes have been deprecated
    3. Parent and defaultContent mappings have been added for Kara-Kalpak (kaa) and Konkani (kok); defaultContent mappings have bee added for Kazakh (kk), Ladin (lld), Latgalian (ltg), Mócheno (mhn), and Chinese (Latin, China) (zh_Latn_CN).
    4. Territory Info (gdp, population, languages) has been updated from World Bank and other sources.
    5. LanguageGroup info has been updated from Wikidata
    6. Plural rules have been added for some new locales
    7. Week data
      • The first day of the week has been changed for AE
      • Hour preferences (12 v 24) have been added for English as used in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Israel (en_HK, en_MY, en_IL)

For a full listing, see ¤¤BCP47 Delta and ¤¤Supplemental Delta

Locale Changes

  1. Major changes to emoji search keywords and short names (see below)
  2. Major changes to Chinese collation, reflecting new data in Unicode 16.0
  3. Added iso8601 patterns to root. These will use localized months, days of the week, day periods, and timezones. In this first version, the separators are not localized, and will use “-” within numeric dates, “:” within times, and " " or ", " between major elements. Full localization will await the next submission phase for CLDR.
  4. Other changes
    1. Various locales also had smaller improvements agreed to by translators.
    2. Additional test files have been added.

For a full listing, see Delta Data

Message Format Specification

The CLDR Technical Committee decided to continue the tech preview phase for Message Format in version 46. The plan is to have a final version of the specification in a 46.1 release before the end of 2024.

The most significant changes since v45 were:

  • Removed all of the reserved and private use syntax constructs, simplifying the grammar.
  • Changed the structure of the .match (selector) to require use of local or input declarations. This is a breaking change for existing v45 messages.
  • Added support for bidirectional isolates and marks and clarified whitespace handling, to better enable messages that contains right-to-left identifiers and text.

Implementers should be aware of the following normative changes after the start of the tech review period.

  • #885 Address equality of name and literal values, including requiring keys to use NFC
  • #884 Add support for bidirectional isolates and strong marks in syntax and address UAX31/UTS55 requirements
  • #883 Remove forward-compatibility promise and all reserved/private syntax.
  • #882 Specify bad-option error for bad digit size options in :number and :integer functions
  • #878 Clarify “rule” selection in :number and :integer functions
  • #877 Match on variables instead of expressions.
  • #854 Allow whitespace at complex message start
  • #853 Add a “duplicate-variant” error
  • #845 Define “attributes” feature
  • #834 Modify the stability policy (not currently in effect due to Tech Preview)
  • #816 Refine error handling
  • #815 Removed machine-readable function registry as a deliverable
  • #813 Change default of :date and :datetime date formatting from short to medium
  • #812 Allow trailing whitespace for complex messages
  • #793 Recommend the use of escapes only when necessary
  • #775 Add formal definitions for variable, external variable, and local variable
  • #774 Refactor errors, adding Message Function Errors
  • #771 Remove inappropriate normative statement from errors.md
  • #767 Add a test schema and #778 validate tests against it
  • #775 Add a definition for variable
  • #774 Refactor error types, adding a Message Function Error type (and subtypes)
  • #769 Add :test:function, :test:select and :test:format functions for implementation testing
  • #743 Collapse all escape sequence rules into one (affects the ABNF)

In addition to the above, the test suite is significantly modified and updated. There will be updated tech preview implementations available in ICU (Java and C++) and in Javascript.

Emoji Search Keywords

The usage model for emoji search keywords is that

  • The user types one or more words in an emoji search field. The order of words doesn't matter; nor does upper- versus lowercase.
  • Each word successively narrows a number of emoji in a results box
    • heart → 🥰 😘 😻 💌 💘 💝 💖 💗 💓 💞 💕 💟 ❣️ 💔 ❤️‍🔥 ❤️‍🩹 ❤️ 🩷 🧡 💛 💚 💙 🩵 💜 🤎 🖤 🩶 🤍 💋 🫰 🫶 🫀 💏 💑 🏠 🏡 ♥️ 🩺
    • blue → 🥶 😰 💙 🩵 🫐 👕 👖 📘 🧿 🔵 🟦 🔷 🔹 🏳️‍⚧️
    • therefore, [heart blue] → 💙 🩵
  • A word matches all the words that begin with it; if there are no such matches, it is ignored.
    • [heart blue confabulation] is equivalent to [heart blue]
  • Whenever the list is short enough to scan, the user will mouse-click on the right emoji — so it doesn't have to be narrowed too far. Thus in the following, the user would just click on 🎉 if that works for them.
    • celebrate → 🥳 🥂 🎈 🎉 🎊 🪅

In this release WhatsApp emoji search keyword data has been incorporated. In the process of doing that, the maximum number of search keywords per emoji has been increased, and the keywords have been simplified in most locales by breaking up multi-word keywords. An example would be white flag (🏳️), formerly having 3 keyword phrases of [white waving flag | white flag | waving flag], now being replaced by the simpler 3 single keywords [white | waving | flag]. The simpler version typically works as well or better in practice.

Collation Data Changes

There are two significant changes to the CLDR root collation (CLDR default sort order).

Realigned With DUCET

The DUCET is the Unicode Collation Algorithm default sort order. The CLDR root collation is a tailoring of the DUCET. These sort orders have differed in the relative order of groups of characters including extenders, currency symbols, and non-decimal-digit numeric characters.

Starting with CLDR 46 and Unicode 16.0, the order of these groups is the same. In both sort orders, non-decimal-digit numeric characters now sort after decimal digits, and the CLDR root collation no longer tailors any currency symbols (making some of them sort like letter sequences, as in the DUCET).

These changes eliminate sort order differences among almost all regular characters between the CLDR root collation and the DUCET. See the CLDR root collation documentation for details.

Improved Han Radical-Stroke Order

CLDR includes data for sorting Han (CJK) characters in radical-stroke order. It used to distinguish traditional and simplified forms of radicals on a higher level than sorting by the number of residual strokes. Starting with CLDR 46, the CLDR radical-stroke order matches that of the Unicode Radical-Stroke Index (large PDF). Its sorting algorithm is defined in UAX #38. Traditional vs. simplified forms of radicals are distinguished on a lower level than the number of residual strokes. This also has an effect on alphabetic indexes for radical-stroke sort orders, where only the traditional forms of radicals are now available as index characters.

JSON Data Changes

  1. Separate modern packages were dropped [CLDR-16465]
  2. Transliteration (transform) data is now available in the cldr-transforms package. The JSON file contains transform metadata, and the _rulesFile key indicates an external (.txt) file containing the actual rules. [CLDR-16720][].

Markdown

The CLDR site is in the process of being moved to markdown source (GFM), which will regularize the formatting and make it easier to maintain and extend than with Google Sites. The URLs will remain the same. This process should be completed before release.

File Changes

Most files added in this release were for new locales, with some files being added for existing locales that increased coverage, such as /testData/personNameTest/ak.txt.

The following new /common/testData/ files have been added:

  • datetime/
    • README.md
    • datetime.json
  • messageFormat/
    • schemas/v0/tests.schema.json
    • messageFormat/tests/
      • data-model-errors.json
      • functions/
        • date.json
        • datetime.json
        • integer.json
        • number.json
        • string.json
        • time.json
      • pattern-selection.json
      • syntax-errors.json
      • syntax.json

A few /common/testData/ files have been replaced:

  • messageFormat/
    • data-model-errors.json
    • syntax-errors.json
    • test-core.json
    • test-core.json.d.ts
    • test-functions.json
    • test-functions.json.d.ts

Tooling Changes

TBD

Migration

  1. Databases that use collation keys are sensitive to any changes in collation, and will need reindexing. This can happen with any CLDR release (especially those for a new version of Unicode), but more characters are affected in this release: see a summary above.
  2. Two collation variants are to be dropped in a v46.1 release: zh-u-co-gb2312 and zh-u-co-big5han. These matched the ordering of two legacy character encodings.
  3. The light-speed data was withdrawn from many locales, because the purpose (as an internal prefix for light-second, light-minute, etc.) was misunderstood. Implementations may hold off supporting it until the data is complete — expected for CLDR v47.

Known Issues

  1. CLDR-17095. The region-based firstDay value (see weekData) is currently used for several different purposes. In the future, some of these functions will be separated out:
    • The day that should be shown as the first day of the week in a calendar view.
    • The first day of the week (day 1) for weekday numbering.
    • The first day of the week for week-of-year calendar calculations.

Acknowledgments

Many people have made significant contributions to CLDR and LDML; see the Acknowledgments page for a full listing. We'd especially like to acknowledge the work done by interns this release: Chris Pyle, Helena Aytenfisu (ህሊና የሺጥላ አይተንፍሱ), and Emiyare Cyril Ikwut-Ukwa.

The Unicode Terms of Use apply to CLDR data; in particular, see Exhibit 1.

For web pages with different views of CLDR data, see http://cldr.unicode.org/index/charts.