ISO 15924 and Unicode Script Dataset

ISO 15924 is an international standard for the various and sundry writing systems of Earth and their associated Unicode scripts.

The Need

I needed a trustworthy dataset in machine-readable format(s) with the following data attributes:

1. Script ID (e.g., Latn)
2. Unicode Script name, if exists (e.g., Latin)
3. Whether or not each script is ancient/historical (e.g., Bassah Vah)

The Dataset

There were many good options, like wooorm/iso-15924, but none that matched all my needs. (Or at least none that I could find.) So I made one myself. It attempts to address the following needs:

• Free -- This dataset is released under the Creative Commons CC0 license.
• All ISO 15924 codes -- All ISO codes in the standard are in this document, and vice-versa.
• All Unicode scripts -- All Unicode scripts in the standard are in this document, and vice-versa.
• Clear provenance -- Data is pulled from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15924
• Easy-to-use -- Data is available in simple JSON and CSV formats.

These data should help users to plan, build, and implement support for Unicode scripts quickly and easily.

The Data

The dataset is comprised of the following data files:

• scripts.jsonl -- This is the "master" file. All other files are generated from this file, either directly or indirectly. It contains data parsed from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15924. There is one JSON record per line.
• scripts.json -- This is the same as scripts.jsonl, but all values are wrapped in one top-level array.
• scripts.min.json -- This is the same as scripts.json, but minified.
• scripts.csv This is the same as scripts.jsonl, but the file format in CSV as opposed to JSON.

Downloading

You can get the data a few different ways:

• Download the CSV files from this repo
• Download the CSV, JSON, and JSONL files from the releases on this repo
• Clone this repo and run make

The License

The data is available under the Creative Commons CC0 license. This places the data into the public domain, so you can do whatever you'd like with it, but I'd appreciate a note if you find it useful! An issue saying "Hello" is great!

Maintenance

I watch the source Wikipedia page and will update this project when there is a relevant change. Release versioning will follow semver. Because this project straddles two different standards, both with their own different versioning schemes, the version format (YYYYMMDD.PATCH) is based on release dates as opposed to versions from either standard. Updates to either standard will trigger a release, and release notes will indicate this.

For example, a (hypothetical) update to ISO 15924 on July 26, 2023 would trigger a major release versioned 20230726.0. A non-breaking minor release (e.g., to fix a typo) on July 28, 2023 would be versioned 20230726.1, indicating that users currently on 20230726.0 may safely update to 20230726.1. A new (hypothetical) update to Unicode on July 29, 2023 would trigger a new major release versioned 20230729.0. And so on.

It's worth nothing that both ISO 15924 and Unicode scripts are fairly stable at this point.