Several 8-bit character sets (encodings) were designed for binary representation of common Western European languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic), which use the Latin alphabet, a few additional letters and ones with precomposed diacritics, some punctuation, and various symbols (including some Greek letters). These character sets also happen to support many other languages such as Malay, Swahili, and Classical Latin.
This material is technically obsolete, having been functionally replaced by Unicode. However it continues to have historical interest.