"Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols […] to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode and also http://www.unicode.org.

Unicode currently supports more than 600 languages, which is its main advantage over other character sets available with ISO or Windows. This is especially important with a multi-language product like phpMyAdmin.

To represent or encode these Unicode characters, many Unicode Transformation Formats (UTF) exist. A popular transformation format is UTF-8, which uses one to four 8-bit octets per character. For more details, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8.

Note that the browser must support UTF-8 (as most current browsers do). The phpMyAdmin distribution kit includes a UTF-8 version of every language file in the lang subdirectory, and some of them are only available in UTF-8 encoding.

A majority of the language files are also coded using ISO or Windows character...