# Languages that use "double byte" characters. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 21, 2003, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-use-double-byte-characters/214523 "2003-11-21T16:29:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Binarydrone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/3da27b/32.png) [@Binarydrone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Binarydrone)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2003, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-use-double-byte-characters/214523/1 "2003-11-21T16:29:24Z")
Can anyone direct me to a comprehensive list of all of the languages that use double byte characters? Thanks ever so much. ---
**Author:** ![bordelond](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bordelond/32/150_2.png) [@bordelond](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bordelond)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2003, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-use-double-byte-characters/214523/2 "2003-11-21T16:45:02Z")
A cursory Googling suggests that of the major languages, only Chinese, Japanese, and Korean require double-byte characters. I’m not 100% prepared to say that’s iron-clad fact, however. I wondered about some alphabetic languages – like Thai, Tibetan, Burmese, Bengali, Tamil, and Hindi – that use various diacritics and extra letters to modify the basic letter set and essentially yield loads of extra characters. But from what I can determine, none of these types of alphabets requires double-byte character sets. I know that Arabic-based alphabets are single-byte, as I once lent my computer to a friend to typeset a book in Gulf Arabic. Hebrew is also a single-byte set. And of course, the plethora of languages with alphabets based on the Roman, Greek, or Cyrillic models are easily accomodated in single-byte schemes. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2003, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-use-double-byte-characters/214523/3 "2003-11-21T19:18:46Z")
How many bytes a single character in an alphabet or character set uses depends on the encoding scheme. If you can use one of the extended asciis (ISO-8859-x), it’s a single byte. If you use some Unicode scheme such as UTF-8, it’s probably going to be more. Because of all the different encoding schemes in use, this is a somewhat complex subject. Here’s a [tutorial](http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars.html) on character encoding schemes. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2003, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/languages-that-use-double-byte-characters/214523/4 "2003-11-21T20:34:00Z")
Hmm, the board software seems to have broken here, as my post was not reflected in the main GQ page.