That's not true. For anything that uses the latin alphabet utf8 will be strictly better as the majority of characters will be in ASCII (1 byte) and the rest wil

That's not true. For anything that uses the latin alphabet utf8 will be strictly better as the majority of characters will be in ASCII (1 byte) and the rest will just need an extra byte, equaling utf16. Looking at the format definition[1] anything below U+0800 will fit in 2 bytes in UTF8. So the ethnocentrism starts at Samaritan[2]. The Japanese, Chinese and Indian scripts are probably the most important in that range. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description [2] http://codepoints.net/basic_multilingual_plane http://codepoints.net/basic_multilingual_plane