ISO-8859-14 ISO-8859-14 (Latin-8, Celtic) ISO-8859
A Celtic-language encoding covering Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, and Cornish.
What it is
ISO-8859-14, or Latin-8, covers Celtic languages — Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, and Cornish — adding the specific accented characters and letter combinations these languages need that aren't present in Latin-1. It's one of the more narrowly-targeted regional variants in the ISO-8859 family, seeing relatively limited real-world adoption even within its target languages before UTF-8 became standard.
Byte structure
| Byte range | Content |
|---|---|
| 0x00–0x7F | Identical to ASCII |
| 0xA0–0xFF | Celtic-specific accented letters and symbols |
Why your text is garbled (symptom → cause)
| Symptom | Likely cause |
|---|---|
| Welsh/Gaelic accented letters display incorrectly | Text is Latin-8 but read as Latin-1 or UTF-8 — differing upper-range character assignments |
Compatibility & gotchas
- Limited real-world adoption even within its target Celtic-language region, similar to Latin-3's limited Turkish/Esperanto/Maltese uptake — Celtic-language digital content historically often used Latin-1 with some character compromises, or moved directly to Unicode once available, rather than adopting Latin-8 specifically in large volumes.
- Rarely encountered in modern development work as a result.
Fixing it
- Command-line conversion:
iconv -f ISO-8859-14 -t UTF-8 input.txt -o output.txt
Comparison
| Encoding | Key difference from ISO-8859-14 |
|---|---|
| ISO-8859-1 | Lacks the specific Celtic-language character combinations Latin-8 adds |
| UTF-8 | Full Unicode coverage, the modern default, and the more common practical choice for Celtic-language digital content |
FAQ
Which languages does ISO-8859-14 cover?
Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, and Cornish — the major Celtic languages, plus standard Latin-1-style coverage for the rest.
Is ISO-8859-14 commonly used for Welsh/Gaelic content today?
Not really — even within its target language region, adoption was limited, and modern Celtic-language digital content overwhelmingly uses UTF-8 instead.
Fun fact
ISO-8859-14's relatively limited adoption, despite targeting real linguistic needs, is often cited alongside Latin-3 as evidence that late-arriving, narrowly-scoped single-byte encodings faced an uphill battle by the time they were standardized — Unicode's broader momentum was already well underway by the time some of the later ISO-8859 variants were finalized.