Page "ISO/IEC 8859" Paragraph 6

Most of the ISO / IEC 8859 encodings provide diacritic marks required for various European languages using the Latin script.

Others provide non-Latin alphabets: Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and Thai.

Most of the encodings contain only spacing characters although the Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic ones do also contain combining characters.

However, the standard makes no provision for the scripts of East Asian languages ( CJK ), as their ideographic writing systems require many thousands of code points.

Although it uses Latin based characters, Vietnamese does not fit into 96 positions ( without using combining diacritics ) either.

Each Japanese syllabic alphabet ( hiragana or katakana, see Kana ) would fit, but like several other alphabets of the world they aren't encoded in the ISO / IEC 8859 system.