CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which constitute the main East Asian languages. The term is used in the field of software and communications internationalization. East Asian languages or the East Asian sprachbund describe two notional groupings of languages in East and Southeast Asia, either (1) languages which have been greatly influenced by Classical Chinese, or the CJKV Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) area or (2) a larger grouping including the CJKV area as well... Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ... Internationalization and localization are means of adapting products such as publications or software for non-native environments, especially other nations and cultures. ...

The term CJKV means CJK plus Vietnamese, which used Chinese characters (chữ nôm) prior to adopting quốc ngữ (see Vietnamese alphabet). Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The Vietnamese alphabet has the following 29 letters, in collating order: Vietnamese also uses the 10 digraphs and 1 trigraph below. ...

These languages all have a shared characteristic: Their writing systems all completely or partly use Chinese characters—hànzì in Chinese, kanji in Japanese, and hanja in Korean. Chinese is only written in Chinese characters and requires c. 4,000 characters for general literacy and there are up to 40,000 characters for reasonably complete coverage. Japanese uses fewer characters—general literacy in Japan can be expected with about 2,000 characters, together with two syllabic alphabets. 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. The number of characters required for complete coverage of all these languages' needs cannot fit in the 256-character code space of 8-bit encodings, requiring at least a 16-bit fixed width character encoding or multi-byte variable-length encodings. The 16-bit fixed width encodings, such as 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 90,000 Han characters—and the requirement by the Chinese government that software in China support the GB18030 character set. Writing systems of the world today. ... Japanese name Kanji: Kana: Korean name Hangul: Hanja: Vietnamese name Vietnamese: Hantu: A Chinese character (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; Pinyin: ) is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese, sometimes Korean, and formerly Vietnamese. ... Japanese name Kanji: Kana: Korean name Hangul: Hanja: Vietnamese name Vietnamese: Hantu: A Chinese character (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; Pinyin: ) is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese, sometimes Korean, and formerly Vietnamese. ... Japanese writing Kanji Kana Hiragana Katakana Hentaigana Manyōgana Uses Furigana Okurigana Rōmaji   ) are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with hiragana (平仮名), katakana (片仮名), and the Arabic numerals. ... Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. ... Look up encoding in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A character encoding or character set (sometimes referred to as code page) consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given set with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the storage of text in computers... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). ...

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. Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... Han unification is the process used by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. ...

CJK character encodings should consist minimally of Han characters plus language-specific phonetic scripts such as pinyin, bopomofo, hiragana, katakana, and hangul. Hanyu Pinyin (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: ), commonly called Pinyin, is the most common variant of Standard Mandarin romanization system in use. ... Zh yīn F o (注音符號), or Symbols for Annotating Sounds, often abbreviated as Zhuyin, or known as Bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) for the first four syllables of these Chinese phonetic symbols, is the national phonetic system of the Republic of China (based on Taiwan... Japanese writing Kanji Kana Hiragana Katakana Hentaigana Manyōgana Uses Furigana Okurigana Rōmaji Hiragana ) is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana and kanji; the Latin alphabet is also used in some cases. ... Katakana ) is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet. ... Jamo redirects here. ...

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

The CJK character sets take up the bulk of the 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 characters sets into a single set of unified characters. Big-5 or Big5 is a character encoding method used in Taiwan (Republic of China) and Hong Kong for Traditional Chinese characters. ... Extended Unix Coding (EUC) is an 8-bit character encoding used primarily for Japanese and Korean. ... Extended Unix Coding (EUC) is an 8-bit character encoding used primarily for Japanese and Korean. ... GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). ... GB2312 is the registered internet name for a key official character set of the Peoples Republic of China, used for simplified Chinese characters. ... ISO 2022, more formally ISO/IEC 2022, is an ISO standard (equivalent to the ECMA standard ECMA-35) specifying a technique for including multiple character sets in a single character encoding. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ...

Chinese and Japanese can be written both left-to-right and top-to-bottom, but is usually considered a left-to-right script when discussing encoding issues. An excerpt from Cold Food Observance (寒食帖) by Song Dynasty scholar Su Shi (蘇軾). The calligraphy is read in columns from right to left. ...

See also

• Chinese character encoding
• Han unification
• Chinese input methods for computers
• Japanese language and computers
• Korean language and computers
• Chữ nôm and computers
• Variable-width encoding
• Complex Text Layout languages (CTL)
• CJK Triangle
• CJK strokes
• Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts
• Graphics tablet

In computing, Chinese character encodings can be used to represent text written in the CJK languages — Chinese, Japanese, Korean — and (rarely) Vietnamese, all of which use Chinese characters. ... Han unification is the process used by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. ... Since the Chinese language uses a logographic script — that is, a script where one or two characters corresponds roughly to one word or meaning — there are vastly more characters, or glyphs, than there are keys on a standard computer keyboard. ... In relation to the Japanese language and computers many adaptation issues arise, some unique to Japanese and others common to languages which have a very large number of characters. ... Computers represent the Korean language in a variety of ways. ... A variable-width encoding is a type of character encoding scheme in which codes of differing lengths are used to encode a character set (a repertoire of symbols) for representation in a computer. ... Complex Text Layout languages (frequently referred to as CTL languages) are languages whose writing systems require complex transformations between text input and text display for proper rendering on the screen or the printed page. ... Outline of the character 永, showing stroke order. ... An excerpt from Cold Food Observance (寒食帖) by Song Dynasty scholar Su Shi (蘇軾). The calligraphy is read in columns from right to left. ... A Wacom Graphire2 graphics tablet. ...

References

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL. The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC) is an online, searchable encyclopedic dictionary of computing subjects. ... Bold text // “GFDL” redirects here. ...

• 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).
• Lunde, Ken. CJKV Information Processing. Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly & Associates, 1998. ISBN 1-56592-224-7.

John DeFrancis is a Chinese language professor emeritus and researcher at the University of Hawaii who wrote a number of Chinese instructional texts (his Readers series is particularly well regarded) in the 60s and 70s. ... Ken Lunde (born Madison, Wisconsin, 1965) is an expert in information processing for East Asian languages. ...

External links

• CJKV: A Brief Introduction
• http://www.praxagora.com/lunde/cjk_inf.html