GSM 03.38

In mobile telephony GSM 03.38 or 3GPP 23.038 is a character encoding used in GSM networks for SMS (Short Message Service), CB (Cell Broadcast) and USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data). The 3GPP TS 23.038 standard (originally GSM recommendation 03.38) defines GSM 7-bit default alphabet which is mandatory for GSM handsets and network elements,^[1] but the character set is suitable only for English and a number of Western-European languages. Languages such as Chinese, Korean or Japanese must be transferred using the 16-bit UCS-2 character encoding. A limited number of languages, like Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and a number of languages used in India written with a Brahmic scripts may use 7-bit encoding with national language shift table defined in 3GPP 23.038. For binary messages, 8-bit encoding is used.