Just make sure they are UTF-8 compliant, which most stuff is these days. That does not, however, mean that such as SQLite, in terms of its language syntax, has to support large numbers of UTF-8 characters. That would risk expanding the library size rather a lot. I find this site useful: https://www.utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8-table.pl?number=1024 I prefer UTF-8 to other encodings as its bottom page is the same as ASCII, and being a variable length encoding, there are no endianness issues.