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. A future version of Unicode, Unicode 11, won’t be finalized until next 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, 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 new emoji were recommended by the folks behind Baidu’s Facemoji keyboard, so although they won’t go live in Unicode until 2018 (if they’re approved), you can use them in the Facemoji app right now if you’re feeling antsy.
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).
Update on Feb 1, 20:42pm SGT: Updated to correct information about Unicode versions, and to add some detail about who recommended these emoji.
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