Comment by necovek

Most languages are well representable with 128 characters (7-bits) if you do not include English characters among those (eg. replace those 52 characters and some control/punctuation/symbols).

This is easily proven by the success of all the ISO-8859-*, Windows and IBM CP-* encodings, and all the *SCII (ISCII, YUSCII...) extensions — they fit one or more languages in the upper 128 characters.

It's mostly CJK out of large languages that fail to fit within 128 characters as a whole (though there are smaller languages too).