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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T16:42:13+00:00

I am writing an article on Unicode and discussing the advantages of this encoding

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I am writing an article on Unicode and discussing the advantages of this encoding scheme over outdated methods like ASCII.

As part of my research I am looking for a reference that listed the languages that could be fully represented using only the characters supported by ASCII. Haven’t had much luck tracking it down with Google and I thought I’d tap the collective knowledge of SO to see if anyone had a reasonable list.

Key points:

  • All languages listed must be able to
    be completely represented using the character set available in ASCII.
  • I know this won’t be comprehensive,
    but I am mostly interested in the
    most common written languages.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There are no natural languages that I know of that can be fully represented in ASCII. Even American English, the language for which ASCII was invented, doesn’t work: for one, there are a lot of foreign words that have been integrated into the American English language that cannot be represented in ASCII, like resumé, naïve or a word that probably every programmer uses regularly, schönfinkeln.

    And two, ASCII is missing pretty much all typographic characters like “quotation marks”, dashes of various lengths (– and —), ellipses (…), thin and wide spaces and so on, all of which are used in American English.

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