ISO-8859-4 ISO-8859-4 (Latin-4, North European) ISO-8859
A Baltic/North European encoding covering Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Greenlandic — largely superseded by ISO-8859-13 for the same region.
What it is
ISO-8859-4, or Latin-4, covers Baltic and North European languages — Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), alongside Scandinavian characters. It was later effectively superseded within its own target region by ISO-8859-13, which refined the Baltic character coverage further — meaning Latin-4 mostly appears today in older legacy data predating that later revision.
Byte structure
| Byte range | Content |
|---|---|
| 0x00–0x7F | Identical to ASCII |
| 0xA0–0xFF | Baltic and North European accented letters and symbols |
Why your text is garbled (symptom → cause)
| Symptom | Likely cause |
|---|---|
| Baltic-language accented letters show incorrectly | Text is Latin-4 but read as Latin-13, Latin-1, or UTF-8 — all differ in the upper byte range |
| Modern Baltic-region software's encoding doesn't match this page | Modern systems more commonly use ISO-8859-13 or UTF-8 for the same languages, not Latin-4 |
Compatibility & gotchas
- Effectively superseded by ISO-8859-13 for the same target languages, which refined character coverage — Latin-4 mainly shows up in genuinely older data.
- Overlaps significantly but not completely with Latin-1's Scandinavian character coverage, alongside additional Baltic-specific letters not present in Latin-1.
Fixing it
- Command-line conversion:
iconv -f ISO-8859-4 -t UTF-8 input.txt -o output.txt
Comparison
| Encoding | Key difference from ISO-8859-4 |
|---|---|
| ISO-8859-13 | The refined successor covering the same Baltic language region, more commonly used in practice |
| UTF-8 | Full Unicode coverage, the modern default |
FAQ
Is ISO-8859-4 still used today?
Rarely as a primary encoding choice — ISO-8859-13 replaced it for Baltic language coverage, and UTF-8 has replaced both for new systems. Latin-4 mainly appears in legacy data.
What's the difference between ISO-8859-4 and ISO-8859-13?
ISO-8859-13 refined and adjusted the Baltic character set coverage that Latin-4 originally attempted, becoming the more commonly adopted choice for Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian text in the years before Unicode dominance.
Fun fact
The existence of both ISO-8859-4 and ISO-8859-13 covering overlapping Baltic-region languages is a small example of a recurring pattern in the ISO-8859 family's history — early encodings often needed revision as the actual linguistic needs of a region became better understood, but the standards body's process for retiring an outdated variant was slower than simply publishing a new one.