Talk:Unicode

Character Array and Name Storage

It is true that "UCS-2 represents characters from U+0000 through U+FFFF; UTF-16 represents characters from U+0000 through U+10FFFF" but only UCS-2 excludes the surrogate pair range of U+D800 through U+DFFF (2,048 characters). UTF-16 uses precisely these surrogate pairs to represent the characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).

It's a bit reductive to say that "UTF-16 is needed mostly for Far Eastern languages" in the sense that the BMP contains the basic characters for Far Eastern languages. The other planes are concerned with anciant scripts (egyptian hyeroglyphs, phoenician, cuneiform but also western and byzantine music and extensions of chinese characters).