The Unicode Technology Workshop 2026 (UTW26) will take place October 20–23, 2026 at École nationale supérieure d’art et de design | Ensad Nancy / Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT) in Nancy, France.

The four-day workshop is the first edition of UTW held in Europe in nearly two decades and follows the 2023, 2024, and 2025 editions in the heart of Silicon Valley, California. Nancy, 90 minutes from Paris, was chosen for its design and cultural heritage and its proximity to the European research ecosystem that surrounds the workshop’s Missing Scripts partners.

The 2026 edition carries the theme “Unicode in the World”, a deliberate framing around two complementary ideas. The first is Unicode’s role as global public infrastructure: time-zone localization, alphabetical sorting, bidirectional text, and non-Gregorian calendars all run on the standard. The second is the widening of the workshop’s community to designers, educators, typographers, linguists, and digital-humanities researchers who use Unicode in practice but rarely have direct channels to the internationalization community that builds it.

What the four days cover

The program pairs advanced tutorials with talks, panels, exhibitions, and networking sessions. Tutorials cover Unicode technologies, CLDR, ICU and ICU4X, internationalization patterns, locale data, text rendering, input methods, script shaping, and global-ready engineering.

Talks and panels feature researchers, engineers, designers, and implementers of multilingual digital systems. Exhibitions showcase work in type design, script digitization, multilingual UX, writing-system innovation, and language-technology projects.

Registration is flexible, with options for Tutorial Days, Session Days, or all four days. Pricing and the full program will be released in the coming months.

Hosts and partners

UTW 2026 is co-hosted by the Unicode Consortium alongside partners in the Missing Scripts Program: the University of California, Berkeley’s Script Encoding Initiative (SEI); Ensad Nancy / Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT); and Institut Designlabor Gutenberg (IDG). The partnership blends technical rigor, design practice, and script research, expanding UTW’s internationalization reach into the communities that depend on Unicode day to day.

Who should attend

UTW is built for software engineers, architects, and standards developers; localization, globalization, and content-platform teams; type designers, typographers, and font engineers; linguists, digital-humanities scholars, and script researchers; students, emerging technologists, and educators; and tool-makers, vendors, and open-source contributors in internationalization and language technology.

Organizations wishing to demonstrate leadership in global software, multilingual UX, internationalization, or cultural preservation are invited to participate as sponsors.