Unicode Consortium is a technical standards body comprised of industry partners that is responsible for developing standards for the universal character encoding for digital environments, including AI technologies. This project investigates how the Unicode standards are handling newly invented scripts called “neographies.” Whether a writing system is encoded in Unicode directly affects its ability to be incorporated into AI tools and other core text technologies. This research presents an opportunity to examine how technologists are making decisions that shape the digital environments and language policy. This project offers a systematic assessment of Unicode’s treatment of neographies. It involves analysis of proposals related to this class of writing systems, participant observation and interviews with Unicode standards-makers and neography proponents, and case studies of selected neographies from contrasting geographic and political contexts. This project aims to understand what kinds of evidence are considered in these cases, how eligibility criteria are applied across contexts, and how standards-makers navigate the line between technical and linguistic authority. The outputs of the project inform decision-making within technical standards bodies and contribute to shaping industry practices around multi-script and multilingual support. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intel