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.The term CJKV means CJK plus
Vietnamese, which in the past used
Chinese characters (
chữ nôm) prior to adopting quốc ngữ (see
Vietnamese alphabet).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
syllabaries. 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
character encodings, requiring at least a 16-bit fixed width 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.
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