The University of California at Berkeley, has been awarded about $300,000 in new funding to continue its effort over the next two years to make writing systems for all languages work on the Internet.

The initiative, already four years old, will focus on encoding eight scripts this year and eight more next year. These include Javanese and assorted Native American languages. More than 80 writing systems are not yet in Unicode, the international character-encoding standard used on the 'Net, according to the university.

"For scholars working with obsolete computing technologies, valuable data is destined for the electronic dustbin unless they are updated to modern computing standards," said Deborah Anderson, a UC Berkeley researcher, in a prepared statement.

It's difficult for backers of obscure scripts to get the scripts included in Unicode, since the research needed to submit a proposal can be expensive to conduct.

Google and the National Endowment for the Humanities are providing the new funding for the Script Encoding Initiative. Total funding to date only adds up to about 20% of the $4 million needed to complete the project's goal.