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Cosmos DB Support CRUD for foreign languages

Arlan 20 Reputation points
2026-04-17T01:53:35.9966667+00:00

Does Cosmos DB Support CRUD for foreign languages i.e. Japanese or Korean? I plan on building a system of records that will contain foreign language text. Is this possible?

Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB

An Azure NoSQL database service for app development.

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Manoj Kumar Boyini 14,900 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator
2026-04-17T02:39:15.0733333+00:00

Hi Arlan

Yes, Azure Cosmos DB supports storing and performing CRUD operations on foreign-language text such as Japanese or Korean. Cosmos DB stores JSON documents using UTF‑8 encoding, allowing multilingual text to be created, read, updated, and deleted without additional configuration. By default, every property of every item is indexed, so standard equality and range queries on text fields will work as expected.

For language-aware full-text search scenarios, Cosmos DB offers full-text indexing (currently in preview) with documented support for select languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. As Japanese and Korean tokenization are not currently supported in this feature, Azure AI Search language analyzers are recommended when linguistic matching or advanced multilingual search capabilities are required.

You can therefore confidently use Cosmos DB as a multilingual system of record for storage and CRUD operations.

References:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cosmos-db/full-text-indexing
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/index-add-language-analyzers

Hope this helps, Please let us know if you have any questions and concerns.

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  1. AI answer

    2026-04-17T01:53:45.0966667+00:00

    Yes. Cosmos DB stores data as Unicode JSON, so CRUD operations work with text in any language, including Japanese and Korean.

    Cosmos DB is a distributed NoSQL database engine designed for semi-structured JSON data with automatic indexing and fast querying. It supports full-text and vector search over this JSON data, and multi-language full-text search is available in preview. Multi-language support allows indexing and searching text in languages beyond English using language-specific tokenization and stemming.

    To use language-aware full-text search over Japanese or Korean text, configure a full-text policy on the container and specify the appropriate language per text path. For example:

    {
  "defaultLanguage": "en-US",
  "fullTextPaths": [
    {
      "path": "/text",
      "language": "ja-JP"  // or appropriate locale for Korean
    }
  ]
}

    Then add a full-text index in the indexing policy and query using the full-text search system functions. Note that multi-language support is in early preview and may not be available in all regions, and behavior can differ from English.

    Even without full-text search, standard CRUD and queries over properties containing Japanese or Korean strings are fully supported.

    References:

    AI-generated content may be incorrect. Read our transparency notes for more information.

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