ISO885914

ISO885914 refers to ISO/IEC 8859-14, part of the ISO/IEC 8859 family of eight-bit single-byte encodings. Also known as Latin-8, it was designed to support Celtic languages by providing Latin letters with diacritics and language-specific characters. The standard preserves the ASCII 0x00–0x7F range and defines additional characters in the 0xA0–0xFF range to accommodate Celtic orthographies. It was published in 1998 by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2 and is one of several language-focused variants in the 8859 series.

In practice, ISO/IEC 8859-14 has had limited adoption. With the rise of Unicode and UTF-8 as the dominant encoding for multilingual text, the use of ISO/IEC 8859-14 on the web and in modern software has been minimal. When encountered in legacy data or older software, conversion to and from Unicode requires mapping tables to ensure correct interpretation of the Celtic-specific characters.

Summary:

- Part of the ISO/IEC 8859 family; 8-bit single-byte encoding

- Also known as Latin-8; designed for Celtic languages

- Preserves ASCII and adds Celtic characters in the upper half

- Published in 1998; largely superseded by Unicode

- Mostly of historical or archival interest today

See also: ISO/IEC 8859 family, Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1), UTF-8, Unicode.