It seems that the unicodedata module already supplies relevant functions which can be used for this. For example, we can replace "char in self._id_first_chars" with something like: from unicodedata import normalize, category norm_char = normalize(char)[0] is_id_first_char = norm_char_first == '_' or category(norm_char_first) in {"Lu", "Ll", "Lt", "Lm", "Lo", "Nl"} I'm not sure what the "Other_ID_Start property" mentioned in [1] and [2] means, though. Can we get someone with more in-depth knowledge of unicode to help with this? The real question is how to do this *fast*, since HyperParser does a *lot* of these checks. Do you think caching would be a good approach? See: .. [1]: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#identifiers .. [2]: http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3131/