Each written language uses its own set of characters called glyphs.

If your UI uses multiple languages, then your typography layout should vary depending on the language. Languages have different average word lengths and heights, affecting how it appears across UIs.

Glyphs

Word length can vary greatly across languages, even those that use similar glyphs, such as English and German.

Length

Some writing systems, like Arabic and Hebrew, are displayed with characters appearing from right to left. 

Those fonts may appear smaller than Latin ones at the same font-size, requiring adjustments to line spacing and alignment so that the typography works well in that UI for all languages.

Alignment

Many writing systems require more vertical space than English, so your UI should provide sufficient vertical space for these different systems.

Height

Vertical typesetting, though rarely used, can display characters vertically instead of horizontally.

The typography of China, Japan, and Korea is typically monospaced, which means each letter occupies the same amount of space as other letters. It is often set left-to-right, top-to-bottom. It can also be set vertically: top-to-bottom and right-to-left.

Vertical typesetting

More than one typeface may need to be used in the same UI to display multilingual content, when each language uses a different writing system.

Writing systems can be grouped into three categories:
- English-like
- Tall
- Dense

Language options

Inportant consideration when using different language.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Language size and display style vary based on whether a character set is English-like, tall, or dense.

Language support

Material Design Documentation

Language considerations

Noto is the default typeface for all languages not covered by Roboto. Derived from Droid, it’s designed to be visually harmonious across languages and scripts with compatible heights and stroke thicknesses.

The family has 93 scripts defined in Unicode version 6.0.

Noto guidance

For ease of internationalization, Google has categorized languages into three categories: English-like, tall, and dense.

English-like: Latin (except Vietnamese), Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Armenian, and Georgian.

Tall: Language scripts that require extra line height to accommodate larger glyphs, including South and Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern languages, like Arabic, Hindi, Telugu, Thai, and Vietnamese.

Dense: Language scripts that require extra line height to accommodate larger glyphs but have different metrics from tall scripts. Includes Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

https://material.io/design/typography/language-support.html#language-categories-reference


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