Unicode

ASCII	7 bits (128 characters)
ISO8859	8 bits (256 characters)
Other Encoding:	EBCDIC (IBM); JIS, Shift-JIS (Japan); TIS (Thailand), ISCII (India)
Unicode à	16 bits (normal) to 21 bits. 16 bits = 65000 characters
Registered in Unicode Standard:	Latin; Cyrillic (Eastern Europe); Arabic, Hebrew (Middle East); Han characters (China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea); Hiragana, Katakana (Japan); Hangul (Korea); Thai, Lao, Khmer, Burmese (South East Asia); Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Gurmukhi, Punjabi, Sinhala (India, Srilangka)
Unicode – first 6500 characters