Language Character Sets
Different languages require different character encodings to represent their alphabets and symbols correctly. This reference maps 88 languages to the legacy character sets that support them. While Unicode (UTF-8) now covers all languages, these encodings remain relevant for legacy systems, file conversion, and data migration.
| Language | Character Sets |
|---|---|
| Afrikaans | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Albanian | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Arabic | ISO-8859-6, Windows-1256 |
| Armenian | ARMSCII-8 |
| Azerbaijani | ISO-8859-9, Windows-1254 |
| Basque | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Belarusian | ISO-8859-5, Windows-1251 |
| Bengali | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Bulgarian | ISO-8859-5, Windows-1251 |
| Catalan | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Chinese (Simplified) | GB2312, GBK, GB18030 |
| Chinese (Traditional) | Big5, Big5-HKSCS |
| Croatian | ISO-8859-2, Windows-1250 |
| Czech | ISO-8859-2, Windows-1250 |
| Danish | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Dutch | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| English | ASCII, ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Esperanto | ISO-8859-3, Windows-1252 |
| Estonian | ISO-8859-4, Windows-1257 |
| Faroese | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Finnish | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| French | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Galician | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Georgian | GEOSTD8 |
| German | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Greek | ISO-8859-7, Windows-1253 |
| Gujarati | Gujarati ISCII |
| Haitian Creole | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Hebrew | ISO-8859-8, Windows-1255 |
| Hindi | Windows-1254 |
| Hungarian | ISO-8859-2, Windows-1250 |
| Icelandic | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Indonesian | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Inuktitut | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Irish | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Italian | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Japanese | Shift_JIS, ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP |
| Kannada | Kannada ISCII |
| Kazakh | PT154 |
| Korean | EUC-KR, ISO-2022-KR |
| Kyrgyz | PT154 |
| Latvian | ISO-8859-4, Windows-1257 |
| Lithuanian | ISO-8859-4, Windows-1257 |
| Luxembourgish | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Macedonian | ISO-8859-5, Windows-1251 |
| Malay | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Malayalam | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Maltese | ISO-8859-3, Windows-1252 |
| Maori | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Marathi | Devanagari ISCII |
| Mongolian | ISO-8859-5, Windows-1251 |
| Nepali | Devanagari ISCII |
| Norwegian | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Oriya | Oriya ISCII |
| Pashto | Windows-1256 |
| Polish | ISO-8859-2, Windows-1250 |
| Portuguese | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Punjabi | Gurmukhi ISCII |
| Quechua | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Romanian | ISO-8859-2, Windows-1250 |
| Russian | ISO-8859-5, Windows-1251 |
| Samoan | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Scottish Gaelic | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Serbian (Cyrillic script) | ISO-8859-5, Windows-1251 |
| Shona | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Sinhala | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Slovak | ISO-8859-2, Windows-1250 |
| Slovenian | ISO-8859-2, Windows-1250 |
| Somali | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Spanish | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Swahili | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Swedish | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Tagalog | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Tamil | TSCII |
| Tatar | PT154 |
| Telugu | Telugu ISCII |
| Thai | TIS-620, Windows-874 |
| Tongan | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Turkish | ISO-8859-9, Windows-1254 |
| Ukrainian | ISO-8859-5, Windows-1251 |
| Urdu | Windows-1256 |
| Uzbek | ISO-8859-5, Windows-1251 |
| Vietnamese | VISCII, Windows-1258 |
| Welsh | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Xhosa | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Yiddish | ISO-8859-8, Windows-1255 |
| Yoruba | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Zulu | ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |