SQL Server Data Types for Chinese Characters and Yale Romanization

I'm building a game for learning Cantonese. A core component is a database table with the following columns:

Chinese Character(s) | Yale Romanization | English Equivalent

What SQL Server data type should I choose for the first and second columns?

I do not yet know where my source data will come from. So I can't yet tell you what encoding it will use. My best guess is UTF-8.

*EDIT - I now know where my source data will come from. Someone will manually enter it into an Excel spreadsheet that I will then import. This raises two related questions. First, what format should the Excel spreadhsheet be saved in to preserve accent marks that are part of Yale romanization? Second, is any font that supports the requisite accent marks acceptab开发者_开发技巧le? Or are only certain fonts compatible with the necessary character encoding?

nvarchar would be the choice for unicode, variable length strings. And you can set collation for each field in the table as well.

As for Excel, I would test it out. My guess would be that Excel would preserve collation, but the best way would be to test it out.