I'm trying to create a database that has to contain articles in different languages. I'm using Mariadb as my server and I know bits of SQL. My knowledge doesn't really cover details like the differences between engines like MyISAM, InnoDB etc or character sets like utf8/16/32, latin 5/7/etc. I do know that the character set has importance, I guess what I'm looking for is an all-encompassing character set and an engine that best deals with this type of content.

Also, is there an advantage in storing articles in multiple data rows (equivalent of different pages) to make things a little faster, or would you store a whole article in a single data row. Or does that depend on the size of the articles?

Sorry for my noobish question, I know the information is all out on the internet but it would take me quite a long time to research and get a grip on everything. Would be cool if someone with experience could give me a little head start and point me in the right direction. This is for a intranet site, consider the content to be somewhat like a blog (and no, I don't want wordpress or something similar at this point).

Not sure if it matters, but I tend to create and manipulate my tables with phpmyadmin, I use apache as web server and it all runs on Linux.