CJK characters

Overview of CJK characters in writing systems

CJK characters refer to the characters used in the writing systems of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. These characters are a significant part of the East Asian cultural sphere and are used in various forms across these languages. The term "CJK" is derived from the initials of these three languages.

Overview

CJK characters are primarily based on Chinese characters, also known as Hanzi in Chinese, Kanji in Japanese, and Hanja in Korean. These characters have been adapted and modified over centuries to fit the linguistic needs of each language.

Chinese Characters (Hanzi)

Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese. Each character represents a word or a meaningful part of a word. Chinese characters are one of the oldest continuously used writing systems in the world.

Japanese Characters (Kanji)

In Japanese, Kanji are used alongside two other scripts: Hiragana and Katakana. Kanji characters are used to represent the core meaning of words, while Hiragana and Katakana are used for grammatical elements and foreign words, respectively.

Korean Characters (Hanja)

Hanja are the Korean name for Chinese characters. While modern Korean primarily uses the Hangul script, Hanja are still used in certain contexts, such as academic texts and legal documents.

Unicode and CJK

The Unicode standard includes a comprehensive set of CJK characters, allowing for the digital representation of these scripts. The CJK Unified Ideographs block in Unicode contains thousands of characters used across these languages.

CJK Variants

Due to the adaptation of Chinese characters into different languages, there are many variants of CJK characters. These include differences in stroke order, character form, and usage.

Also see

• Chinese writing system
• Japanese writing system
• Korean writing system
• Unicode
• East Asian scripts