Unicode

Unicode (specifically UCS-2 encoding in SMS) is the character encoding standard that supports characters from virtually all writing systems — including Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Hindi, and emoji. Using Unicode in an SMS reduces the per-segment character limit from 160 to 70, meaning messages with even a single non-GSM character (like an emoji or accented letter outside the GSM set) will be encoded as Unicode and may result in additional message segments.