Levenshtein distance on non-English strings

Question

Will the Levenshtein distance algorithm work well for non-English language strings too?

Update: Would this work automatically in a language like Java when comparing Asian characters?

Answer 1

Only if language is letter based. For example Russian, German,... but hieroglyph (China for example) or syllable (like Laos) - not.

Answer 2

Yes. But you have to treat the non-english characters as "1 character", not as multiple characters (for example with utf-8). For example, in python you would use the unicode class to represent the string (and characters).