Michael Everson

Michael Everson (born January 9, 1963) is an expert in the writing systems of the world. He is active in supporting minority-language communities, especially in the fields of character encoding standardization and internationalization. He is one of the co-authors of the Unicode Standard and contributing editor to ISO/IEC 10646. He is a linguist, typesetter, and font designer who has contributed to the encoding of many scripts and characters. He received the Unicode "Bulldog" Award in 2000 for his technical contributions to the development and promotion of the Unicode Standard.

Everson was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and moved to Tucson, Arizona at the age of 12. Interest in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien led him first to Old English and then to other Germanic languages. He studied German, Spanish, and French for his B.A. at the University of Arizona (1985), and the History of Religions and Indo-European linguistics for his M.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles (1988). He moved to Dublin in 1989, and was a Fulbright Scholar in the Faculty of Celtic Studies, University College Dublin (1991). He was naturalized as an Irish citizen in 2000. In September 2004 he moved to Westport, County Mayo. He is a Buddhist.

Active in the area of practical implementations, Everson has created locale and language information for many languages, from support for the Irish language and the other Celtic languages to the minority languages of Finland. In 2003 he was commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme to prepare a report on the computer locale requirements for the major languages of Afghanistan (Pashto, Dari, and Uzbek), which was endorsed by the Ministry of Communications of the Afghan Transitional Islamic Administration. He has a keen interest in typeface design, and in Gaelic typography in particular, and does a considerable amount of work typesetting books in Irish.

Everson has been actively involved in the encoding of Balinese, Braille, Buginese, Buhid, Cherokee, Coptic, Cuneiform, Cypriot, Deseret, Ethiopic, Georgian, Glagolitic, Gothic, Hanunóo, Khmer, Limbu, Linear B, Mongolian, Myanmar, New Tai Lue, N'Ko, Ogham, Old Italic, Old Persian, Osmanya, Phoenician, Runic, Shavian, Sinhala, Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Tai Le, Thaana, Tibetan, Ugaritic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, and Yi as well as many characters belonging to the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic scripts.

Together with John Cowan he is responsible for the ConScript Unicode Registry, a project to coordinate the mapping of scripts not or not yet supported by Unicode into the Private Use Area. Everson is responsible for several encoding proposals in Unicode, such as Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Tengwar, and Cirth.

External links

• An article written by Michael Erard about Everson, published in the New York Times, September, 2003
• An interview with Everson by Dick Gordon on The Connection, a National Public Radio public affairs call-in program
• Evertype.com, Michael Everson's web site