The Unicode Consortium announced the release of new versions of the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR 1.1) and the Locale Data Markup Language specification (LDML 1.1), providing building blocks for software to support the world’s languages. This new release contains data for 247 locales, covering 78 languages and 118 countries. There are also 36 draft locales in the process of being developed, covering an additional 17 languages and 7 countries. To support users in different languages, programs must not only use translated text, but must also be adapted to local conventions. These conventions differ by language or region and include the formatting of numbers, dates, times, and currency values, as well as support for differences in measurement units or text sorting order. Most operating systems and many application programs currently maintain their own repositories of locale data to support these conventions. But such data are often incomplete, idiosyncratic, or gratuitously different from program to program. The Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) provides a general XML format for the exchange of locale information for use in application and system software development, combined with a public repository for a common set of locale data in that format. In this release, CLDR 1.1 contains roughly 50% more data than CLDR 1.0: adding many translated terms for languages, scripts, countries, currencies, and time zones. It also improves collation for a number of languages in Eastern Europe, and adds stand-alone month data for Slavic languages and Greek, and narrow month/day names for quite a number of languages. The LDML 1.1 adds new formats for narrow and stand-alone month and day names (used in online calendar applications), and POSIX compatibility fields. www.unicode.org/cldr/