The languages of Western, Central, and Eastern Europe and much of Africa are typically written in the Latin alphabet. Vietnamese is a notable exception in that, while it uses a localized form of the Latin writing system, its accented glyphs can be much taller than those found in Western European languages. The Greek and Cyrillic writing systems are very similar to Latin.

English-like typefaces

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.

Tall typefaces

Language scripts that require extra line height to accommodate larger glyphs, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Dense typefaces

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

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Inportant consideration when using different language.

Language considerations

Material Design Documentation

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.

Learn Before

Related

Learn After