# Hani is a set of characters, which includes not only Simplified and Traditional Chinese,
# but also Japanese Kanji and Korean Hanja.
id: "Hani"
name: "Han"
family: "East Asian"
summary: "Han (Hanzi, Kanji, Hanja, <span class=\'autonym\'>汉字, 漢字</span>) is an East Asian logo-syllabary, written vertically right-to-left and horizontally left-to-right (over 1.3 billion users). Used at least since the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BCE) to write the Chinese (Sinitic) languages like Mandarin and Cantonese, but also, today or in the past, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Okinawan, Zhuang, Miao and other languages. The Han script has regional variations: Traditional Chinese (since the 5th century CE, today used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau), Simplified Chinese (used since 1949–1956 in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia), Japanese (called Kanji, used together with the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries in Japan), Korean (called Hanja, widely used for the Korean language since 400 BCE until the mid-20th century). Fundamentally the same characters represent the same or highly related concepts across dialects and languages, which themselves are often mutually unintelligible or completely unrelated. Some 2,100–2,500 Han characters are required for basic literacy, some 5,200–6,300 for reading typical texts. Many more are needed for specialized or historical texts: the Unicode Standard encodes over 94,000 Han characters. "
