internationalization In economics, 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 strateg ...

, CJK characters is a collective term for the Chinese,

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

, and

Korean language Korean ( South Korean: , ''hangugeo''; North Korean: , ''chosŏnmal'') is the native language for about 80 million people, mostly of Korean descent. It is the official and national language of both North Korea and South Korea (geographic ...

s, all of which include

Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji ...

and derivatives in their writing systems, sometimes paired with other scripts. Collectively, the CJK characters often include ''Hànzì'' in Chinese, ''

Kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...

'' and ''

Kana The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most p ...

'' in Japanese, ''

Hanja Hanja (Hangul: ; Hanja: , ), alternatively known as Hancha, are Chinese characters () used in the writing of Korean. Hanja was used as early as the Gojoseon period, the first ever Korean kingdom. (, ) refers to Sino-Korean vocabulary, ...

'' and ''

Hangul The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The le ...

'' in Korean.

Vietnamese Vietnamese may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia ** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam. * Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam ** Overse ...

can be included, making the abbreviation CJKV, as Vietnamese historically used Chinese characters in which they were known as '' Chữ Hán'' and ''

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

'' in Vietnamese ('' Hán-Nôm'' altogether).

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 in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, hum ...

, 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 Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

-based

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese, Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally writte ...

for Chinese,

hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contrast ...

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 f ...

for Japanese, and

hangul The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The le ...

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 Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning "literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning "literar ...

was the written language of government and scholarship in Vietnam. Popular literature in

was written in the ''

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

'' 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 The Vietnamese alphabet ( vi, chữ Quốc ngữ, lit=script of the National language) is the modern Latin writing script or writing system for Vietnamese. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages originally developed by Portuguese m ...

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 Graphics, graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of Language, human language, allowing them to be Data storage, stored, Data communication, transmi ...

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, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

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

, bopomofo, hiragana, katakana and hangul. CJK character encodings include: *

Big5 Big-5 or Big5 is a Chinese character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for traditional Chinese characters. The People's Republic of China (PRC), which uses simplified Chinese characters, uses the GB 18030 character set inst ...

(the most prevalent encoding before Unicode was implemented) *

CCCII 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. It is used mostly by ...

* CNS 11643 (official standard of Republic of China) *

EUC-JP Extended Unix Code (EUC) is a multibyte character encoding system used primarily for Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese. The most commonly used EUC codes are variable-length encodings with a character belonging to an compliant coded char ...

EUC-KR Extended Unix Code (EUC) is a multibyte character encoding system used primarily for Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese. The most commonly used EUC codes are variable-length encodings with a character belonging to an compliant coded char ...

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. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

) * Giga Character Set (GCS) *

ISO 2022-JP ISO/IEC 2022 ''Information technology—Character code structure and extension techniques'', is an ISO/IEC standard (equivalent to the ECMA standard ECMA-35, the ANSI standard ANSI X3.41 and the Japanese Industrial Standard JIS X 0202) in the ...

* KS C 5861 * 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 type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from othe ...

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 John DeFrancis (August 31, 1911January 2, 2009) was an American linguist, sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. B ...

. '' 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