In internationalization, CJK characters is a collective term for graphemes used in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems, which each include Chinese characters. The term CJKV also includes Vietnamese, which was also historically written with Chinese characters.
Standard Mandarin Chinese and Standard Cantonese are written almost exclusively in Chinese characters. Over 3,000 characters are required for general literacy, with up to 40,000 characters for reasonably complete coverage. Japanese uses fewer characters—general literacy in Japanese can be expected with 2,136 characters. The use of Chinese characters in Korea is increasingly rare, although idiosyncratic use of Chinese characters in proper names requires knowledge (and therefore availability) of many more characters. Even today, however, South Korean students are taught 1,800 characters.
Other scripts used for these languages, such as bopomofo and the Latin-based pinyin for Chinese, hiragana and katakana for Japanese, and hangul for Korean, are not strictly "CJK characters", although CJK character sets almost invariably include them as necessary for full coverage of the target languages.
The sinologist Carl Leban (1971) produced an early survey of CJK encoding systems.
Until the early 20th century, Classical Chinese was the written language of government and scholarship in Vietnam. Popular literature in Vietnamese was written in the chữ Nôm script, consisting of Chinese characters with many characters created locally. From 1920s onwards, the script since then used for recording literature has been the Latin chữ Quốc ngữ. [1] [2]
The number of characters required for complete coverage of all these languages' needs cannot fit in the 256-character code space of 8-bit character encodings, requiring at least a 16-bit fixed width encoding or multi-byte variable-length encodings. The 16-bit fixed width encodings, such as those from Unicode up to and including version 2.0, are now deprecated due to the requirement to encode more characters than a 16-bit encoding can accommodate—Unicode 5.0 has some 70,000 Han characters—and the requirement by the Chinese government that software in China support the GB 18030 character set.
Although CJK encodings have common character sets, the encodings often used to represent them have been developed separately by different East Asian governments and software companies, and are mutually incompatible. Unicode has attempted, with some controversy, to unify the character sets in a process known as Han unification.
CJK character encodings should consist minimally of Han characters plus language-specific phonetic scripts such as pinyin, bopomofo, hiragana, katakana and hangul.
CJK character encodings include:
The CJK character sets take up the bulk of the assigned Unicode code space. There is much controversy among Japanese experts of Chinese characters about the desirability and technical merit of the Han unification process used to map multiple Chinese and Japanese character sets into a single set of unified characters.[ citation needed ]
All three languages can be written both left-to-right and top-to-bottom (right-to-left and top-to-bottom in ancient documents), but are usually considered left-to-right scripts when discussing encoding issues.
Libraries cooperated on encoding standards for JACKPHY characters in the early 1980s. According to Ken Lunde, the abbreviation "CJK" was a registered trademark of Research Libraries Group [3] (which merged with OCLC in 2006). The trademark owned by OCLC between 1987 and 2009 has now expired. [4]
Han unification is an effort by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the Han characters of the so-called CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. Han characters are a feature shared in common by written Chinese (hanzi), Japanese (kanji), Korean (hanja) and Vietnamese.
In computing, Chinese character encodings can be used to represent text written in the CJK languages—Chinese, Japanese, Korean—and (rarely) obsolete Vietnamese, all of which use Chinese characters. Several general-purpose character encodings accommodate Chinese characters, and some of them were developed specifically for Chinese.
GB 18030 is a Chinese government standard, described as Information Technology — Chinese coded character set and defines the required language and character support necessary for software in China. GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the People's Republic of China (PRC) superseding GB2312. As a Unicode Transformation Format, GB18030 supports both simplified and traditional Chinese characters. It is also compatible with legacy encodings including GB/T 2312, CP936, and GBK 1.0.
Extended Unix Code (EUC) is a multibyte character encoding system used primarily for Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese (characters).
GB/T 2312-1980 is a key official character set of the People's Republic of China, used for Simplified Chinese characters. GB2312 is the registered internet name for EUC-CN, which is its usual encoded form. GB refers to the Guobiao standards (国家标准), whereas the T suffix denotes a non-mandatory standard.
The Chinese Character Code for Information Interchange or CCCII is a character set developed by the Chinese Character Analysis Group in Taiwan. It was first published in 1980, and significantly expanded in 1982 and 1987.
The CNS 11643 character set, also officially known as the Chinese Standard Interchange Code or CSIC, is officially the standard character set of Taiwan. In practice, variants of the related Big5 character set are de facto standard.
Mojikyō, also known by its full name Konjaku Mojikyō, is a character encoding scheme. The Mojikyō Institute, which published the character set, also published computer software and TrueType fonts to accompany it. The Mojikyō Institute, chaired by Tadahisa Ishikawa (石川忠久), originally had its character set and related software and data redistributed on CD-ROMs sold in Kinokuniya stores.
む, in hiragana, or ム in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. The hiragana is written with three strokes, while the katakana is written with two. Both represent.
A Unicode font is a computer font that maps glyphs to code points defined in the Unicode Standard. The vast majority of modern computer fonts use Unicode mappings, even those fonts which only include glyphs for a single writing system, or even only support the basic Latin alphabet. Fonts which support a wide range of Unicode scripts and Unicode symbols are sometimes referred to as "pan-Unicode fonts", although as the maximum number of glyphs that can be defined in a TrueType font is restricted to 65,535, it is not possible for a single font to provide individual glyphs for all defined Unicode characters. This article lists some widely used Unicode fonts that support a comparatively large number and broad range of Unicode characters.
The Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts share a common background, collectively known as CJK characters. During the process called Han unification, the common (shared) characters were identified and named CJK Unified Ideographs. As of Unicode 15.1, Unicode defines a total of 97,680 characters.
Radical 213 meaning "turtle" is one of only two of the 214 Kangxi radicals that are composed of 16 strokes.
JIS X 0212 is a Japanese Industrial Standard defining a coded character set for encoding supplementary characters for use in Japanese. This standard is intended to supplement JIS X 0208. It is numbered 953 or 5049 as an IBM code page.
KPS 9566 is a North Korean standard specifying a character encoding for the Chosŏn'gŭl (Hangul) writing system used for the Korean language. The edition of 1997 specified an ISO 2022-compliant 94×94 two-byte coded character set. Subsequent editions have added additional encoded characters outside of the 94×94 plane, in a manner comparable to UHC or GBK.
KS X 1001, "Code for Information Interchange ", formerly called KS C 5601, is a South Korean coded character set standard to represent Hangul and Hanja characters on a computer.
The CCITT Chinese Primary Set is a multi-byte graphic character set for Chinese communications created for the Consultative Committee on International Telephone and Telegraph (CCITT) in 1992. It is defined in ITU T.101, annex C, which codifies Data Syntax 2 Videotex. It is registered with the ISO-IR registry for use with ISO/IEC 2022 as ISO-IR-165, and encodable in the ISO-2022-CN-EXT code version.
The Vietnamese language is written with a Latin script with diacritics which requires several accommodations when typing on phone or computers. Software-based systems are a form of writing Vietnamese on phones or computers with software that can be installed on the device or from third-party software such as UniKey. Telex is the oldest input method devised to encode the Vietnamese language with its tones. Other input methods may also include VNI and VIQR. VNI input method is not to be confused with VNI code page.
Source Han Serif is a serif Song/Ming typeface created by Adobe and Google.
GB 12345, entitled Code of Chinese ideogram set for information interchange supplementary set, is a Traditional Chinese character set standard established by China, and can be thought as the traditional counterpart of GB 2312. It is used as an encoding of traditional Chinese characters, although it is not as commonly used as Big5. It has 6,866 characters, and has no relationship nor compatibility with Big5 and CNS 11643.
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I is a Unicode block comprising CJK Unified Ideographs included in drafts of an amendment to China's GB 18030 standard circulated in 2022 and 2023, which were fast-tracked into Unicode in 2023.