CJK is a collective term for Chinese Japanese and Korean which is used in the field of software and communications internationalization.

The term CJKV means CJK plus Vietnamese which constitute the main East Asian languages. Contents 1 Characteristics 2 See also 3 References 4 External links Characteristics

These languages all have a shared characteristic: Their writing systems all completely or partly use Chinese characters Hnz in Chinese kanji in Japanese hanja in Korean and Hn t in Vietnamese.

Chinese is written in Chinese characters only and requires c. 4000 characters for general literacy although there are up to 40000 characters for reasonably complete coverage.

Japanese uses fewer characters general literacy in Japan can be expected with about 2000 characters together with two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana).

The use of Chinese characters in Korea is becoming increasingly rare altogether although idiosyncratic use of Chinese characters in proper names requires knowledge (and therefore availability) of many more characters. Hangul is now the native alphabet of Korean.

In the past Vietnamese used Han-Nm prior to adopting Quc Ng. The written form of Han-Nm died out during the 20th century.

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 70000 Han characters and the requirement by the Chinese government that software in China support the GB18030 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: Big5 EUC-JP EUC-KR GB18030 (the mandated standard in the People's Republic of China) GB2312 ISO 2022-JP KS C 5861 Shift-JIS Unicode encodings 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 but are usually considered left-to-right scripts when discussing encoding issues. See also Chinese character encoding Han unification Chinese input methods for computers Japanese language and computers Korean language and computers Input method editor Variable-width encoding Complex Text Layout languages (CTL) CJK strokes Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts Graphics tablet List of CJK fonts References This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing which is licensed under the GFDL. DeFrancis John. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press 1990. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6. Hannas William C. Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press 1997. ISBN 0-8248-1892-X (paperback); ISBN 0-8248-1842-3 (hardcover). Lemberg Werner: The CJK package for LATEX2Multilingual support beyond babel. TUGboat Volume 18 (1997) No. 3Proceedings of the 1997 Annual Meeting Lunde Ken. CJKV Information Processing. Sebastopol Calif.: O'Reilly & Associates 1998. ISBN 1-56592-224-7. External links CJKV: A Brief Introduction Lemberg CJK article from above TUGboat18-3 On CJK Unified Ideograph from Wenlin.com