In internationalization, CJK characters is a collective term for graphemes used in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems, which each include

Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...

. It can also go by CJKV to include Chữ Nôm, the Chinese-origin

logographic In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek 'word', and 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese c ...

script formerly used for the

Vietnamese language Vietnamese () is an Austroasiatic languages, Austroasiatic language Speech, spoken primarily in Vietnam where it is the official language. It belongs to the Vietic languages, Vietic subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family. Vietnamese is s ...

, or CJKVZ to also include Sawndip, used to write the Zhuang languages.

Character repertoire

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, some South Korean students learn 1,800 characters. Other scripts used for these languages, such as bopomofo and the

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

-based

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...

for Chinese,

hiragana is a Japanese language, Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", ...

and

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...

for Japanese, and

hangul The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language. In North Korea, the alphabet is known as (), and in South Korea, it is known as (). The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs ...

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 script, consisting of Chinese characters with many characters created locally. Since the 1920s, the script since then used for recording literature has been the Latin-based

Vietnamese alphabet The Vietnamese alphabet (, ) is the modern writing script for the Vietnamese language. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages like French language, French, originally developed by Francisco de Pina (1585–1625), a missionary from P ...

Encoding

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 encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...

s, 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 Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

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.

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

, bopomofo, hiragana, katakana and hangul. CJK character encodings include: * Big5 (the most prevalent encoding before Unicode was implemented) * CCCII * CNS 11643 (official standard of

Republic of China Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...

) * EUC-JP *

EUC-KR Extended Unix Code (EUC) is a multibyte character encoding system used primarily for Japanese language, Japanese, Korean language, Korean, and simplified Chinese characters, simplified Chinese (characters). The most commonly used EUC codes are va ...

* GB 2312 (subset and predecessor of GB 18030) * GB 18030 (mandated standard in the

People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

) * Giga Character Set (GCS) * ISO 2022-JP * ISO-2022-KR * KS X 1001 * KPS 9566 * Shift-JIS * TRON *

The CJK character sets take up the bulk of the assigned

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. 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.

Legal status

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 GroupKen Lunde, 1996
/ref> (which merged with OCLC in 2006). The trademark owned by OCLC between 1987 and 2009 has now expired.Justia listing
/ref>

References

Works cited

* *

Sources

* DeFrancis, John. '' The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy''. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990. . * Hannas, William C. ''Asia's Orthographic Dilemma''. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. (paperback); (hardcover). * Lemberg, Werner: The CJK package for LATEX2ε—Multilingual support beyond babel. TUGboat, Volume 18 (1997), No. 3—Proceedings of the 1997 Annual Meeting. * Leban, Carl.
Automated Orthographic Systems for East Asian Languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
', State-of-the-art Report, Prepared for the Board of Directors, Association for Asian Studies. 1971. * Lunde, Ken. ''CJKV Information Processing''. Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly & Associates, 1998. .

External links

CJKV: A Brief Introduction

Lemberg CJK article from above, TUGboat18-3

On "CJK Unified Ideograph"
from Wenlin.com

{{CJK ideographs in Unicode Encodings of Asian languages Languages of East Asia Natural language and computing Chinese-language computing Japanese-language computing Korean-language computing Writing systems using Chinese characters ja:CJKV