ISO-8859-10 ISO-8859-10 (Latin-6, Nordic) ISO-8859
A Nordic encoding extending Latin-4's Baltic/Scandinavian coverage to include Inuit and Icelandic characters more completely.
What it is
ISO-8859-10, or Latin-6, refines and extends the Nordic language coverage that ISO-8859-4 attempted, adding better support for Icelandic and Inuit (Greenlandic) languages alongside the Baltic and Scandinavian characters. Like the other later-generation ISO-8859 revisions, it addresses gaps discovered in earlier variants covering the same general region.
Byte structure
| Byte range | Content |
|---|---|
| 0x00–0x7F | Identical to ASCII |
| 0xA0–0xFF | Nordic, Baltic, Icelandic, and Inuit accented letters and symbols |
Why your text is garbled (symptom → cause)
| Symptom | Likely cause |
|---|---|
| Nordic/Icelandic accented letters display incorrectly | Text is Latin-6 but read as Latin-1, Latin-4, or UTF-8 — all differ in the upper byte range assignments |
Compatibility & gotchas
- One of several overlapping Nordic/Baltic ISO-8859 revisions (alongside Latin-4 and Latin-1's partial Scandinavian coverage) — the overlap and multiple near-similar variants for the same general region is a recurring ISO-8859 family pattern.
- Rarely encountered in modern software — like most single-byte regional encodings, effectively superseded by UTF-8.
Fixing it
- Command-line conversion:
iconv -f ISO-8859-10 -t UTF-8 input.txt -o output.txt
Comparison
| Encoding | Key difference from ISO-8859-10 |
|---|---|
| ISO-8859-4 | The earlier, less complete attempt at similar Nordic/Baltic coverage |
| UTF-8 | Full Unicode coverage, the modern default |
FAQ
How is ISO-8859-10 different from ISO-8859-4?
Latin-6 extends and refines the Nordic/Baltic coverage Latin-4 originally attempted, adding more complete Icelandic and Inuit language support.
Fun fact
ISO-8859-10's addition of Inuit (Greenlandic) language support made it one of the more geographically specific entries in the ISO-8859 family, reflecting how granular the pre-Unicode single-byte encoding landscape had become before Unicode's unified approach made region-specific encodings largely unnecessary.