With the release of Unicode 16.0 this September, I may finally be able to use my own language’s script. But I am not sure if OSes will directly support the latest version of Unicode immediately. How long should I expect these changes to be available on my local OS?
With that being said, I would like to work on creating my own font, maybe also migrate a few corpuses from the wrong script to the original, new one, as well as work on transliteration.
All of this is impossible for a single person - but I would like to take it slowly. What would be a good place to start? Do I need to keep anything else in mind while starting on this journey?
Depends on what your language’s script is then with assigned Unicode characters, how wide-spread it is, when fonts will support the glyphs, and what you mean by “changes to be available on my local OS”. What OS? What does available mean here? Do you expect the OS UI to be in your language? Doubtful. Some desktop environment maybe somewhen. Programs using ICU are more likely to support specific script related features (e.g. word/line breaking, transliteration) when ICU will support Unicode 16 in its next version. Locale specifics may have to wait for or could be contributed to CLDR that is also used by ICU. Availability of any UI in the language mostly depends on whether translators contribute to the relevant projects.
ICU & CLDR is an excellent place to start for anyone who wants to help out with support for any not yet well supported script and/or language, for those libraries and that data are what a lot of other things are built upon (like Android, iOS, Windows and macOS, to take four of the largest and most well known examples).
To get in touch and offer to volunteer, sending a mail to the icu-support public mailing list can be a good starting point: https://icu.unicode.org/contacts