List of writing systems

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Writing systems are used to record human language, and may be classified according to certain common features.

Writing systems currently in use around the world; The usual name of the script is given first; the name of the languages in which the script is written follows (in brackets), particularly in the case where the language name differs from the script name. Other informative or qualifying annotations for the script may also be provided.
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Proto-writing and ideographic systems

Ideographic scripts (in which graphemes are ideograms representing concepts or ideas rather than a specific word in a language) and pictographic scripts (in which the graphemes are iconic pictures) are not thought to be able to express all that can be communicated by language, as argued by the linguists John DeFrancis and J. Marshall Unger. Essentially, they postulate that no true writing system can be completely pictographic or ideographic; it must be able to refer directly to a language in order to have the full expressive capacity of a language. Unger disputes claims made on behalf of Blissymbols in his 2004 book Ideogram.

Although a few pictographic or ideographic scripts exist today, there is no single way to read them because there is no one-to-one correspondence between symbol and language. Hieroglyphs were commonly thought to be ideographic before they were translated, and to this day, Chinese is often erroneously said to be ideographic.[1] In some cases of ideographic scripts, only the author of a text can read it with any certainty, and it may be said that they are interpreted rather than read. Such scripts often work best as mnemonic aids for oral texts or as outlines that will be fleshed out in speech.

More information Name, Language(s) ...
Ideographic systems for language
Name Language(s) Notes
Adinkra

Akan
Birch-bark glyphs Anishinaabemowin
Dongba Naxi Often supplemented with syllabic Geba script.
Ersu Shaba script Ersu
Kaidā glyphs
Lusona
Lukasa Luba
Nsibidi Ekoi, Efik, Igbo
Siglas poveiras
Testerian Used for missionary work in Mexico.
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There are also symbol systems used to represent things other than language:

More information Name, Notes ...
Ideographic systems for things other than language
Name Notes
Emojis Used as expressive icons in modern media
Blissymbols A constructed ideographic script used primarily in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC)
iConji A constructed ideographic script used primarily in social networking
Isotype
LoCoS
A wide variety of notation systems
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Logographic systems

In logographic writing systems, glyphs represent words or morphemes (meaningful components of words, as in mean-ing-ful) rather than phonetic elements.

No logographic script is composed solely of logograms; all contain graphemes that represent phonetic (sound-based) elements as well. These phonetic elements may be used on their own (to represent, for example, grammatical inflections or foreign words), or may serve as phonetic complements to a logogram (used to specify the sound of a logogram that might otherwise represent more than one word). In the case of Chinese, the phonetic element is built into the logogram itself; in Egyptian and Mayan, many glyphs are purely phonetic, whereas others function as either logograms or phonetic elements, depending on context. For this reason, many such scripts may be more properly referred to as logosyllabic or complex scripts; the terminology used is largely a product of custom in the field, and is to an extent arbitrary.

Consonant-based logographies

Syllable-based logographies

Syllabaries

In a syllabary, graphemes represent syllables or moras. (The 19th-century term syllabics usually referred to abugidas rather than true syllabaries.)

Semi-syllabaries

In most of these systems, some consonant-vowel combinations are written as syllables, but others are written as consonant plus vowel. In the case of Old Persian, all vowels were written regardless, so it was effectively a true alphabet despite its syllabic component. In Japanese, a similar system plays a minor role in foreign borrowings; for example, [tu] is often written as <to> + reduced-size <u>, and [ti] as <te> + reduced-size <i>. These syllables and a few others, which do not exist in a conservative phonology of modern Japanese, are nevertheless needed for loanwords which the Japanese are increasingly intent on pronouncing as close as possible to the source language, hence the orthographic innovation. Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries behaved as a syllabary for the stop consonants and as an alphabet for the rest of consonants and vowels.

The Tartessian or Southwestern script is typologically intermediate between a pure alphabet and the Paleohispanic full semi-syllabaries. Although the letter used to write a stop consonant was determined by the following vowel, as in a full semi-syllabary, the following vowel was also written, as in an alphabet. Some scholars treat Tartessian as a redundant semi-syllabary, others treat it as a redundant alphabet. Other scripts, such as Bopomofo, are semi-syllabic in a different sense: they transcribe half syllables. That is, they have letters for syllable onsets and rimes (kan = "k-an") rather than for consonants and vowels (kan = "k-a-n").

Consonant-vowel semi-syllabaries

Onset-rime semi-syllabaries

Segmental systems

A segmental script has graphemes which represent the phonemes (basic unit of sound) of a language.

Note that there need not be (and rarely is) a one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes of the script and the phonemes of a language. A phoneme may be represented only by some combination or string of graphemes, the same phoneme may be represented by more than one distinct grapheme, the same grapheme may stand for more than one phoneme, or some combination of all of the above.

Segmental scripts may be further divided according to the types of phonemes they typically record:

Abjads

An abjad is a segmental script containing symbols for consonants only, or where vowels are optionally written with diacritics ("pointing") or only written word-initially.

True alphabets

A true alphabet contains separate letters (not diacritic marks) for both consonants and vowels.

Linear nonfeatural alphabets

Writing systems used in countries of Europe.[note 1]
  Greek
  Greek & Latin (Cyprus)
  Latin
  Latin & Cyrillic (Bosnia, Serbia, North Macedonia)
  Cyrillic
  Georgian
  Armenian

Linear alphabets are composed of lines on a surface, such as ink on paper.

Featural linear alphabets

A featural script has elements that indicate the components of articulation, such as bilabial consonants, fricatives, or back vowels. Scripts differ in how many features they indicate.

Linear alphabets arranged into syllabic blocks

Manual alphabets

Manual alphabets are frequently found as parts of sign languages. They are not used for writing per se, but for spelling out words while signing.

Other non-linear alphabets

These are other alphabets composed of something other than lines on a surface.

Abugidas

An abugida, or alphasyllabary, is a segmental script in which vowel sounds are denoted by diacritical marks or other systematic modification of the consonants. Generally, however, if a single letter is understood to have an inherent unwritten vowel, and only vowels other than this are written, then the system is classified as an abugida regardless of whether the vowels look like diacritics or full letters. The vast majority of abugidas are found from India to Southeast Asia and belong historically to the Brāhmī family, however the term is derived from the first characters of the abugida in Ge'ez: አ (a) ቡ (bu) ጊ (gi) ዳ (da) — (compare with alphabet). Unlike abjads, the diacritical marks and systemic modifications of the consonants are not optional.

Brahmi family

A Palaung manuscript written in a Brahmic abugida

Other abugidas

Final consonant-diacritic abugidas

In at least one abugida, not only the vowel but any syllable-final consonant is written with a diacritic. That is, if representing [o] with an under-ring, and final [k] with an over-cross, [sok] would be written as s̥̽.

Vowel-based abugidas

In a few abugidas, the vowels are basic, and the consonants secondary. If no consonant is written in Pahawh Hmong, it is understood to be /k/; consonants are written after the vowel they precede in speech. In Japanese Braille, the vowels but not the consonants have independent status, and it is the vowels which are modified when the consonant is y or w.

List of writing systems by adoption

The following list contains writing systems that are in active use by a population of at least 0.5% of the global population. Sum exceeds 100% because some people use multiple scripts.

More information Name of script, Type ...
Name of script Type Population actively using (in millions) % of population[3] Languages associated with Regions using script de facto
Latin
Latin		 Alphabet 5500[4][note 2] 66.27% Latin, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, English, Dutch, German, Nordic languages, Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Latvian Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Slovenian, Albanian, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Malaysian, Indonesian, Filipino, Maltese, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Turkmen, Somali, Afar, Oromo, Swahili, Vietnamese Default
Chinese
汉字
漢字		 Logographic 1467[5] 17.67% Mandarin, Min, Wu, Yue, Jin, Gan, Hakka, Kanji, Hanja, Chữ Nôm, Sawndip. Eastern Asia, Singapore
Arabic
العربية		 Abjad or Abugida (when diacritics are used) 1022[5] 12.31% Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, Urdu, Shahmukhi, Pashto, Sindhi, Balochi, Kashmiri, Uyghur, Kazakh, Azeri,
Malay		 Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Brunei, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Libya, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen
Devanagari
देवनागरी		 Abugida 742 8.94% Bhojpuri, Hindi, Kashmiri, Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Bodo, Newar, Sherpa India, Nepal and Fiji
Bengali-Assamese
বাংলা		 Abugida 320 3.86% Bengali, Assamese, Meitei, Bishnupriya Manipuri Bangladesh and India
Cyrillic
Кирилица		 Alphabet 248[5] 2.99% Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Belarusian, Ukrainian,Abkhaz, Chechen, Avar, Karelian, Ossetic, Tajik, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Mongolian. Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan
Kana
かな
カナ		 Syllabary 122 1.47% Japanese, Ryukyuan languages, Hachijō, Ainu, Palauan[6] Japan
Telugu
తెలుగు		 Abugida 83 1.00% Telugu India
Hangul
한글
조선글		 Alphabet, featural 79 0.95% Korean, Cia-Cia North Korea and South Korea, Indonesia
Tamil
தமிழ்		 Abugida 78.6 0.95% Tamil India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia
Thai
ไทย		 Abugida 70 0.84% Thai Thailand
Javanese

ꦲꦏ꧀ꦱꦫꦗꦮ

 Abugida 68 0.82% Javanese, Madurese Indonesia
Gujarati
ગુજરાતી		 Abugida 57.1 0.69% Gujarati India
Kannada
ಕನ್ನಡ		 Abugida 45[note 3] 0.54% Kannada India
Geʽez
ግዕዝ		 Abugida 41.85 0.50% Amharic, Tigrinya Ethiopia, Eritrea
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Undeciphered and possible writing systems

Main article: Undeciphered writing systems

These systems have not been deciphered. In some cases, such as Meroitic, the sound values of the glyphs are known, but the texts still cannot be read because the language is not understood. Several of these systems, such as Isthmian script and Indus script, are claimed to have been deciphered, but these claims have not been confirmed by independent researchers. In many cases it is doubtful that they are actually writing. The Vinča symbols appear to be proto-writing, and quipu may have recorded only numerical information. There are doubts that the Indus script is writing, and the Phaistos Disc has so little content or context that its nature is undetermined.

Undeciphered manuscripts

Comparatively recent manuscripts and other texts written in undeciphered (and often unidentified) writing systems; some of these may represent ciphers of known languages or hoaxes.

Phonetic alphabets

This section lists alphabets used to transcribe phonetic or phonemic sound; not to be confused with spelling alphabets like the ICAO spelling alphabet. Some of these are used for transcription purposes by linguists; others are pedagogical in nature or intended as general orthographic reforms.

Alternative alphabets

Fictional writing systems

See List of constructed scripts for an expanded version of this table.

More information Name, Type ...
Name Type Language Work
Aiha Alphabet Kesh Always Coming Home
Ath Alphabet Baronh Crest of the Stars
Aurebesh Alphabet Galactic Basic (i.e. English) Star Wars
Cirth Alphabet Khuzdul, Sindarin, Quenya, Westron, English The Lord of the Rings
D'ni Alphabet D'ni Myst
Hymmnos Alphabet Hymmnos Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia
KLI pIqaD Alphabet Klingon Star Trek
Loxian Abjad Loxian Amarantine and other projects by Enya and Roma Ryan
Mandel Alphabet Klingon Star Trek
On Beyond Zebra!
Sarati Abugida Quenya The Lord of the Rings
Sitelen Pona Logography Toki Pona
Tengwar Abugida or alphabet Quenya, Sindarin, English The Lord of the Rings
Ultima scripts Abjad Various Ultima
Unown Pokémon
Utopian Alphabet Utopian Utopia
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See also

Notes

  1. [1]
    This maps shows languages official in the respective countries; if a country has an independent breakaway republic, both languages are shown. Moldova's sole official language is Romanian (Latin-based), but the unrecognized de facto independent republic of Transnistria uses three Cyrillic-based languages: Ukrainian, Russian, and Moldovan. Georgia's official languages are Georgian and Abkhazian (in Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia), the sparsely recognized de facto independent republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia use Cyrillic-based languages: Both republics use Russian. Additionally, Abkhazia also uses Abkhaz, and South Ossetia uses Ossetian. Additionally, Serbia's sole official language is Cyrillic Serbian, but within the country, Latin script for Serbian is also widely used.
  2. [2]
    Difficult to determine, as it is used to write a very large number of languages with varying literacy rates among them.
  3. [3]
    Based on 46 million speakers of Kannada, Tulu, Konkani, Kodava, Badaga in a state with a 75.6 literacy rate. url=http://updateox.com/india/26-populated-cities-karnataka-population-sex-ratio-literacy

References

External links

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