Need a list of languages that are supported completely by ASCII encoding.

Question

I am writing an article on Unicode and discussing the advantages of this encoding scheme over outdated methods like ASCII.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

Answer 1

I assume you mean natural languages and only 7 bit ASCII?

In that case the list is quite small. Mostly english.

Answer 2

Given loan words, I don't think there are any such languages. Even ugly Americans know the difference between "resume" and "résumé".

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Some constructed languages such as Interlingua and Ido are designed to use only ASCII characters. ‘Real’ languages in everyday use tend to use characters outside the ASCII range, at the very least for loanwords.

Answer 5

IIRC from my Latin classes, the macrons in Latin are later additions by people studying meters in Latin poetry; they wouldn't have been used in every-day writing. So you've got Latin.