internationalization Internationalization or Internationalisation is the process of increasing involvement of enterprises in international markets, although there is no agreed definition of internationalization. Internationalization is a crucial strategy not only for ...

, CJK characters is a collective term for

graphemes In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived from Ancient Greek ('write'), and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other emic units. The study of graphemes ...

used in the Chinese, Japanese, and

Korean writing system Korean is the native language for about 81 million people, mostly of Korean descent. It is the national language of both South Korea and North Korea. In the south, the language is known as () and in the north, it is known as (). Since the tu ...

s, 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 Chữ Nôm (, ) is a logographic writing system formerly used to write the Vietnamese language. It uses Chinese characters to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, with other words represented by new characters ...

, 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 (Sawndip: ; ) are Chinese characters used to write the Zhuang languages in the Chinese provinces of Guangxi and Yunnan. is a Standard Zhuang, Zhuang word that means "immature characters". The Zhuang word for Chinese characters used in the Chi ...

, used to write the

Zhuang languages The Zhuang languages (; autonym: , , pre-1982: , Sawndip: 話僮, from ''vah'', 'language' and ''Cuengh'', 'Zhuang'; ) are the more than a dozen Tai languages spoken by the Zhuang people of Southern China in the province of Guangxi and adjace ...

Character repertoire

Standard Mandarin Chinese and Standard Cantonese are written almost exclusively in Chinese characters. Over 3,000 characters are required for general

literacy Literacy is the ability to read and write, while illiteracy refers to an inability to read and write. Some researchers suggest that the study of "literacy" as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was ...

, 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 Bopomofo, also called Zhuyin Fuhao ( ; ), or simply Zhuyin, is a Chinese transliteration, transliteration system for Standard Chinese and other Sinitic languages. It is the principal method of teaching Chinese Mandarin pronunciation in Taiwa ...

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 Sinology, also referred to as China studies, is a subfield of area studies or East Asian studies involved in social sciences and humanities research on China. It is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of the Chinese civilizatio ...

Carl Leban (1971) produced an early survey of CJK encoding systems. Until the early 20th century,

Classical Chinese Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from . For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary ...

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 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 n ...

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 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 featur ...

. CJK character encodings should consist minimally of Han characters plus language-specific phonetic scripts such as

, 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 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), ...

(subset and predecessor of 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 ISO/IEC 2022 ''Information technology—Character code structure and extension techniques'', is an ISO/ IEC standard in the field of character encoding. It is equivalent to the ECMA standard ECMA-35, the ANSI standard ANSI X3.41 and the Japane ...

KS X 1001 KS X 1001, "''Code for Information Interchange (Hangul and Hanja)''", formerly called KS C 5601, is a South Korean coded character set standard to represent Hangul and Hanja characters on a computer. KS X 1001 is encoded by the most common leg ...

* KPS 9566 * Shift-JIS *

TRON ''Tron'' (stylized as ''TRON'') is a 1982 American science fiction action adventure film written and directed by Steven Lisberger from a story by Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird. The film stars Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn, a computer programmer ...

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

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 A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a form of intellectual property that consists of a word, phrase, symbol, design, or a combination that identifies a Good (economics and accounting), product or Service (economics), service f ...

of Research Libraries GroupKen Lunde, 1996
/ref> (which merged with

OCLC OCLC, Inc. See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the ...

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