The Wired article 'Why Unicode is putting its emoji up for adoption' explaines something about the Unicode Consortium works, as it announces that Unicode is now allowing the adoption of characters in a scheme to 1. raise funding for encoding historical scripts like Egyptian hieroglyphs and for more language support, and 2. to allow for more imagination and diversity in emoticons for commercial and personal use. Prices range from$100 to$5,000. If successful, cultural and language diversity should be enhance. Unicode says "The magnitude of the issue is large...as far as languages go, we have very good support for the top 70 or so, and then it starts to fall off. There are many, many thousands of languages that need to be added. We have a long way to go.' It will be interesting to see how far this project gets.