difference between varchar and nvarchar in sql 2008

VARCHAR is an abbreviation for variable-length character string. It’s a string of text characters that can be as large as the page size for the database table holding the column in question. The size for a table page is 8,196 bytes, and no one row in a table can be more than 8,060 characters. This in turn limits the maximum size of a VARCHAR to 8,000 bytes.

The “N” in NVARCHAR means uNicode. Essentially, NVARCHAR is nothing more than a VARCHAR that supports two-byte characters. The most common use for this sort of thing is to store character data that is a mixture of English and non-English symbols — in my case, English and Japanese.

You can get a detail description between two on that following link

http://www.dotnetglobe.com/2008/03/difference-between-nvarchar-and-varchar.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186939.aspx