The alphabet contains the most-often used symbols from most Western-European languages (and some Greek uppercase letters).
Some ASCII characters and the Euro sign did not fit into the GSM 7-bit default alphabet and must be encoded using two septets.
These characters form GSM 7 bit default alphabet extension table.
In 3GPP TS 23.038 8.0.0 published in 2008 a new feature, an extended National language shift table was introduced, which in the version 11.0.0 published in 2012 covers Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu languages.
The non-segmented message using national language shift table(s) may carry up to 155 (or 153) 7-bit characters.