Software Internationalization Guide

Software Characteristics That Vary by Locale

Software Internationalization Guide—526225-002

2-6

Multibyte Code Sets

Multibyte code sets represent characters that require more than one byte to store

encoded values. Eight-bit code sets are often subsets of multibyte code sets.

East Asian Code Sets

The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages consist of several thousand

ideographic characters. Eight bits are not enough to represent these characters—

16 bits or more are required. The Chinese National Standard (CNS), Chinese Guo Biao

(GB), Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS), and Korean Standard (KS) are groups that

have created standard code sets.

Table 2-3

lists a few of the East Asian standard code sets and the languages they

support.

Table 2-2. ISO 8859 Code Sets

Code Set Name Languages Supported

ISO 8859-1 Western European – Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish,

French, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese,

Spanish, Swedish

ISO 8859-2 Eastern European – Albanian, Czechoslovakian, English, German,

Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian

ISO 8859-3 Southeastern European – Afrikaans, Catalan, Dutch, English,

Esperanto, German, Italian, Maltese, Spanish, Turkish

ISO 8859-4 Northern European – Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish, German,

Greenlandic, Sami (Lappish), Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Swedish

ISO 8859-5 Latin and Cyrillic-Based — Bulgarian, Byelorussian, English,

Macedonian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian

ISO 8859-6 Latin and Arabic

ISO 8859-7 Latin and Greek

ISO 8859-8 Latin and Hebrew

ISO 8859-9 Western European and Turkish — Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish,

French, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish,

Swedish, Turkish

ISO 8859-10 Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Greenlandic, Icelandic,

Sami (Lappish), Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Faeroese, Swedish

Table 2-3. East Asian Code Sets (page 1 of 2)

Code Set Name Languages Supported

CNS 11643 Traditional Chinese

GB 18030 Modern Chinese

GB 2312 Simplified Chinese