ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999,Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9, is part of theISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standardcharacter encodings, first edition published in 1999. It is informally referred to asLatin-9 (and for a whileLatin-0). It is similar toISO 8859-1, and thus also intended for “Western European” languages, but replaces some less common symbols with theeuro sign and some letters that were deemed necessary.^[1]

ISO-8859-15 is theIANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with theC0 and C1 control codes fromISO/IEC 6429.

Microsoft has assignedcode page 28605 a.k.a.Windows-28605 to ISO-8859-15. IBM has assignedcode page 923 (CCSID 923) to ISO 8859-15.^[2][3]

All the printable characters from both ISO/IEC 8859-1 and ISO/IEC 8859-15 are also found inWindows-1252. Since October 2016, less than 0.1% (actually currently less than 0.02%) of all web sites use ISO-8859-15.^[4][5]

The identifier ISO 8859-15 was proposed for theSami languages in 1996, which was eventually rejected, but was passed asISO-IR 197.^[6][7][8]

ISO 8859-16 was proposed as a similar encoding to today's ISO 8859-15, to replace 11 unused or rarely usedISO 8859-1 characters with the missing French Œ œ (at the same spot as same place asDEC-MCS andLotus International Character Set) and Ÿ (which was not at the same place as these sets, as Ý was in that spot for Icelandic), Dutch IJ ij, and Turkish Ğ ğ İ ı Ş ş. The euro sign did not exist at the time.^[9]

The draft was as follows:

The name was later changed to ISO-8859-0 and was restructured by 1997. The Turkish characters were removed because it was considered that it would potentially do more harm to Turkish then-current practice while UCS (Unicode) implementation was not that far away, and the DutchIJ ligature was removed as the existing digraphij was found to be adequate. It was also considered to add theWelsh Ŵ ŵ and Ŷ ŷ, but that was postponed pending further investigation. 4 unused or rarely usedISO 8859-1 characters (¤,¨,´, and¸) were replaced with€,Ÿ,Œ, andœ respectively.^[10]€ became necessary when theeuro was introduced.Ÿ is needed so that French text can be converted from lower-case to all-caps and back again without loss, andŒ andœ are French ligatures. Ironically, the last three had already been present inDEC'sMultinational Character Set (MCS) in 1983, a character set from whichECMA-94 (1985) and ISO-8859-1 (1987) were derived. Since their original codepoints were now occupied by other characters, less logical codepoints had to be chosen for their reintroduction.

The same proposal also recommended replacing 6 more characters (¢,¦,±,¼,½,¾) with "some other characters to cover a maximum of languages". The reasons for choosing these characters was stated in the proposal.^[10]For the euro sign, some wanted to replace the plus–minus sign instead of the currency sign. The currency sign is used in some applications as afield separator and in some others to indicatesubtotal. There was strong opposition to this. One person said "The proposed «+-» is not an adequate fall-back, as this sequence, though rarely used, has already a fixed mathematical meaning, quite different from «±»; and, even if a reader would deduce the intended meaning, «±», from the context, «+-» in lieu of «±» will hurt a physicist's æsthetic feelings at least as much as «oe» in lieu of an o-e ligature a Francophone's."^[11]In the end,± was kept, and¤ was removed (as originally planned).

Circa 1997/1998 (whenWindows-1252 was updated) four characters were selected:Š,š,Ž, andž, which are used inFinnish andEstonian for thetransliteration ofRussian loanwords and names. The proposal was renamed to ISO 8859-15 at the same time. In the end the characters¦,¼,½, and¾ were removed, while¢ was kept because it was more common than the other four.

There were attempts to make ISO 8859-15 the default character set for 8-bit communication, but it was never able to supplant the popular ISO 8859-1. It did see some use as the default character set for the text console and terminal programs under Linux when the euro sign was needed, but the use of fullUnicode was not practical, but this has since been replaced withUTF-8.

ISO 8859-15 encodes what it refers to as "Latin alphabet no. 9". This character set is used throughout theAmericas,Western Europe,Oceania, and much ofAfrica. It is also commonly used in most standard romanizations of East-Asian languages.

Each character is encoded as a single eight-bit code value. These code values can be used in almost any data interchange system to communicate in the following languages:

Notes

For some languages listed above, the correct typographicalquotation marks are missing, since only «, », ", and ' are included.

Also, this encoding does not provide the correct character for the apostrophe, and oriented single high quotation marks, although some texts use the spacing grave accent and spacing acute accent, which are both part of ISO 8859-1, instead of the 6-shaped/9-shaped quotations marks or apostrophes (and this works reliably with some font styles, where all these characters are displayed as slanted wedge glyphs).

Differences fromISO-8859-1 have the Unicode code point shown underneath the character.

ISO 8859-15 also has the following, vendor-specific aliases:

• WE8ISO8859P15 (Oracle database)^[15]

• Western Latin character sets (computing)
• DIN 91379 Unicode subset for Europe

• ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9 (published March 15, 1999)
• ISO/IEC 8859-15(final committee draft dated August 1, 1997)
• ISO Latin 9 as compared with ISO Latin 1
• ISO-IR 203 European supplementary Latin set(September 16, 1998)

• ISO/IEC 8859
• Computer-related introductions in 1998

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata