This is a list of writing systems (or scripts), classified according to some common distinguishing features.

The usual name of the script is given first; the name of the language(s) 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.

Principal scripts at the national level, with selected regional and minority scripts.

Alphabet Latin Cyrillic&Latin Greek Georgian Armenian	Logographic+Syllabic Hanzi (L) Kana (2S)+Kanji(L) Hangul(Featural-alphabetic S)+limited Hanja(L)
Abjad Arabic&Latin Hebrew	Abugida N, S Indic Ethiopic Thaana Canadian Syllabic

Writing systems of the world today.

Pictographic/ideographic writing systems[edit]

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 full 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.

• Aztec – Nahuatl – Although some proper nouns have phonetic components.^[2]
• Mixtec – Mixtec
• Dongba – Naxi – Although this is often supplemented with syllabic Geba script.
• Ersu Shābā – Ersu
• Míkmaq hieroglyphic writing – Míkmaq – Does have phonetic components, however.
• Nsibidi – Ekoi, Efik/Ibibio, Igbo
• Testerian – used for missionary work in Mexico
• Other Mesoamerican writing systems with the exception of Maya Hieroglyphs.

There are also symbol systems used to represent things other than language, or to represent constructed languages. Some of these are

• Blissymbols – A constructed ideographic script used primarily in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC).
• iConji – A constructed ideographic script used primarily in social networking
• Isotype (picture language)
• Sona language
• A wide variety of notations

Linear B and Asemic writing also incorporate ideograms.

Logographic writing systems[edit]

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

Note that no logographic script is comprised solely of logograms. All contain graphemes which 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 which 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, while 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[edit]

• Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, and Demotic – writing systems of Ancient Egypt
  • Egyptian hieroglyphs
    • List of Egyptian hieroglyphs by common name: A-L
    • List of Egyptian hieroglyphs by common name: M-Z

Syllable-based logographies[edit]

• Anatolian hieroglyphs – Luwian
• Cuneiform – Sumerian, Akkadian, other Semitic languages, Elamite, Hittite, Luwian, Hurrian, and Urartian
• Chinese characters (Hanzi) – Chinese, Japanese (called Kanji), Korean (called Hanja), Vietnamese (called Han-Nom, obsolete)
  • Jurchen script – Jurchen
  • Khitan large script – Khitan
  • Tangut script – Tangut
  • Zhuang script – Zhuang
  • Nom – Vietnamese (for vernacular Vietnamese, now obsolete)
• Eghap (or Bagam) script
• Mayan – Chorti, Yucatec, and other Classic Maya languages
• Yi (classical) – various Yi/Lolo languages
• Shui script – Shui language

Syllabaries[edit]

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

• Afaka – Ndyuka
• Alaska script – Central Yup'ik
• Cherokee – Cherokee
• Cypriot – Arcadocypriot Greek
• Geba – Naxi
• Kana – Japanese
  • Hiragana
  • Katakana
  • Man'yōgana
• Kikakui – Mende
• Kpelle – Kpelle
• Linear B – Mycenean Greek
• Nü Shu – Chinese
• Vai – Vai
• Woleaian – Woleaian (a likely syllabary)
• Yi (modern) – various Yi/Lolo languages

Semi-syllabaries: Partly syllabic, partly alphabetic scripts[edit]

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 written [to]+[u], and [ti] as [te]+[i]. 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. Zhuyin is semi-syllabic in a different sense: it transcribes half syllables. That is, it has letters for syllable onsets and rimes (kan = "k-an") rather than for consonants and vowels (kan = "k-a-n").

• Paleohispanic semi-sillabaries – Paleohispanic languages
  • Tartessian or Southwestern script – Tartessian or Southwestern language
  • Southeastern Iberian script – Iberian language
  • Northeastern Iberian script – Iberian language
  • Celtiberian script – Celtiberian language

• Old Persian Cuneiform – Old Persian
• Zhuyin fuhao – phonetic script for Chinese languages, and principal script for several Formosan languages.^{[citation needed]}

• Eskayan – Bohol, Philippines (a syllabary apparently based on an alphabet; some alphabetic characteristics remain)

• Bamum script – Bamum (a defective syllabary, with alphabetic principles used to fill the gaps)

Segmental scripts[edit]

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[edit]

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.

• Aramaic
• Arabic – Arabic, Azeri, Punjabi, Baluchi, Kashmiri, Pashto, Persian, Kurdish (vowels obligatory), Sindhi, Uighur (vowels obligatory), Urdu, and the languages of many other peoples of the Near East
• Hebrew Square Script – Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish languages
• Jawi – Arabic, Malay
• Manichaean script
• Nabataean – the Nabataeans of Petra
• Pahlavi script – Middle Persian
  • Parthian
  • Psalter
• Phoenician – Phoenician and other Canaanite languages
• Proto-Canaanite
• Sabaean
  • South Arabian – Sabaic, Qatabanic, Himyaritic, and Hadhramautic
• Sogdian
• Samaritan (Old Hebrew) – Aramaic, Arabic, and Hebrew
• Syriac – Syriac
• Tifinagh – Tuareg
• Ugaritic – Ugaritic, Hurrian

True alphabets[edit]

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

Linear nonfeatural alphabets[edit]

Writing systems used in countries of Europe.

  Greek

  Greek & Latin

  Latin

  Latin & Cyrillic

  Cyrillic

  Georgian

  Armenian

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

• Uyghur Arabic alphabet (Uyghur Ereb Yéziqi) – Uyghur
• Armenian – Armenian
• Avestan alphabet – Avestan
• Beitha Kukju – Albanian
• Borama – Somali
• Caucasian Albanian alphabet – Old Udi language
• Coptic – Egyptian
• Cyrillic – Eastern Slavic languages (Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian), eastern South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian), the other languages of Russia, Kazakh language, Kyrgyz language, Tajik language, Mongolian language. Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are changing to the Latin alphabet but still have considerable use of Cyrillic. See Languages using Cyrillic.
• Eclectic Shorthand
• Elbasan – Albanian
• Fraser – Lisu
• Gabelsberger shorthand
• Georgian – Georgian and other Kartvelian languages
• Glagolitic – Old Church Slavonic
• Gothic – Gothic
• Greek – Greek
• International Phonetic Alphabet
• Kaddare – Somali
• Latin AKA Roman – originally Latin language; most current western and central European languages, Turkic languages, sub-Saharan African languages, indigenous languages of the Americas, languages of maritime Southeast Asia and languages of Oceania use developments of it. Languages using a non-Latin writing system are generally also equipped with Romanization for transliteration or secondary use.
• Manchu – Manchu
• Mandaic – Mandaic dialect of Aramaic
• Mongolian – Mongolian
• Neo-Tifinagh – Tamazight
• N'Ko – Maninka language, Bambara, Dyula language
• Ogham (Irish pronunciation: [oːm]) – Gaelic, Britannic, Pictish
• Old Hungarian (in Hungarian magyar rovásírás or székely-magyar rovásírás) – Hungarian
• Old Italic – a family of connected alphabets for the Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Messapian, South Picene, Raetic, Venetic, Lepontic, Camunic languages
• Old Permic (also called Abur) – Komi
• Old Turkic – Turkic
• Old Uyghur alphabet – Uyghur
• Osmanya – Somali
• Runic alphabet – Germanic languages
• Ol Cemet' – Santali
• Somali ancient script
• Tai Lue – Lue
• Vah  – Bassa
• Zaghawa  – Zaghawa

Featural linear alphabets[edit]

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.

• Gregg Shorthand
• Hangul – Korean
• Shavian alphabet
• Tengwar (a fictional script)
• Visible Speech (a phonetic script)
• Stokoe notation for American Sign Language
• SignWriting for sign languages

Manual alphabets[edit]

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.

• American manual alphabet (used with slight modification in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Paraguay, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand)
• British manual alphabet (used in some of the Commonwealth of Nations, such as Australia and New Zealand)
• Catalonian manual alphabet
• Chilean manual alphabet
• Chinese manual alphabet
• Dutch manual alphabet
• Ethiopian manual alphabet (an abugida)
• French manual alphabet
• Greek manual alphabet
• Icelandic manual alphabet (also used in Denmark)
• Indian manual alphabet (a true alphabet?; used in Devanagari and Gujarati areas)
• International manual alphabet (used in Germany, Austria, Norway, Finland)
• Iranian manual alphabet (an abjad; also used in Egypt)
• Israeli manual alphabet (an abjad)
• Italian manual alphabet
• Korean manual alphabet
• Latin American manual alphabets
• Polish manual alphabet
• Portuguese manual alphabet
• Romanian manual alphabet
• Russian manual alphabet (also used in Bulgaria and ex-Soviet states)
• Spanish manual alphabet (Madrid)
• Swedish manual alphabet
• Yugoslav manual alphabet

Other non-linear alphabets[edit]

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

• Braille (Unified) – an embossed alphabet for the visually impaired, used with some extra letters to transcribe the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets, as well as Chinese
• Braille (Korean)
• Braille (American) (defunct)
• New York Point – a defunct alternative to Braille
• International maritime signal flags (both alphabetic and ideographic)
• Morse code (International) – a trinary code of dashes, dots, and silence, whether transmitted by electricity, light, or sound) representing characters in the Latin alphabet.
• American Morse code (defunct)
• Optical telegraphy (defunct)
• Flag semaphore – (made by moving hand-held flags)

Abugidas[edit]

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.

Abugidas of the Brāhmī family[edit]

A Palaung manuscript written in a Brahmic abugida

• Anga Script – Angika
• Ahom
• Assamese – Assamese/Assamiya/Ôxômiya
• Brāhmī – Prakrit, Sanskrit
• Balinese
• Batak – Toba and other Batak languages
• Baybayin – Ilokano, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Tagalog, Bikol languages, Visayan languages, and possibly other Philippine languages
• Bengali – Bengali, Maithili
• Buhid
• Burmese – Burmese, Karen languages, Mon, and Shan
• Cham
• Dehong – Dehong Dai
• Devanāgarī – Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Nepali, and many other languages of northern India
• Gujarāti – Gujarāti, Kachchi
• Gurmukhi script – Punjabi
• Hanuno’o
• Javanese
• Kaganga – Rejang
• Kaithi
• Kannada – Kannada, Tulu
• Kawi
• Khmer
• Lao
• Limbu
• Lontara’ – Buginese, Makassar, and Mandar
• Malayalam
• Mithilākshara {syn. Vaidehī lipi / Tirahutā / Tirhutā } Used to write Maithili
• Modi – Marathi
• Nepal – Nepal Bhasa, Sanskrit
• Oriya
• Phags-pa – Mongolian, Chinese, and other languages of the Yuan Dynasty Mongol Empire
• Ranjana – Nepal Bhasa, Sanskrit
• Śāradā
• Siddham used to write Sanskrit
• Sinhala
• Sourashtra
• Soyombo
• Sundanese
• Syloti Nagri – Sylheti
• Tagbanwa – Languages of Palawan
• Tai Dam
• Tai Tham – Khün, and Northern Thai
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Thai
• Tibetan
• Tirahutā / Tirhutā {syn. Vaidehī lipi / Mithilākshara } used to write Maithili
• Tocharian
• Varang Kshiti – Ho

Other Abugidas[edit]

• Canadian Aboriginal syllabics – Cree syllabics (for Cree), Inuktitut syllabics (for Inuktitut), and other variants for Ojibwe, Carrier, Blackfoot, and other languages of Canada
• Ethiopic – Amharic, Ge’ez, Oromo, Tigrigna
• Kharoṣṭhī – Gandhari, Sanskrit
• Mandombe
• Meroitic – Meroë
• Pitman Shorthand
• Pollard script – Miao
• Sorang Sompeng – Sora
• Thaana – Dhivehi
• Thomas Natural Shorthand

Final consonant-diacritic abugidas[edit]

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

• Róng – Lepcha

Vowel-based abugidas[edit]

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.

• Boyd's Syllabic Shorthand
• Japanese Braille – Japanese
• Pahawh Hmong – Hmong

List of writing scripts by adoption[edit]

This is an incomplete list. You can help by expanding it.^[3]

Less than 100 million users[edit]

Less than 20 million users[edit]

Undeciphered systems which may be writing[edit]

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 Epi-Olmec and Indus, 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 Indus is writing, and the Phaistos Disc has so little content or context that its nature in undetermined.

• Byblos syllabary – the city of Byblos
• Isthmian (apparently logosyllabic)
• Indus – Indus Valley Civilization
• Quipu – Inca Empire (probably numerical only)
• Khitan small script – Khitan
• Cretan hieroglyphs
• Linear A (a syllabary) – Minoan
• Mixtec – Mixtec (perhaps pictographic)
• Olmec – Olmec civilization (possibly the oldest Mesoamerican script)
• Phaistos Disc (a unique text, very possibly not writing)
• Proto-Elamite – Elam (nearly as old as Sumerian)
• Rongorongo – Rapa Nui (perhaps a syllabary)
• Proto-Sinaitic (likely an abjad)
• Zapotec – Zapotec (another old Mesoamerican script)
• Banpo symbols  – Yangshao culture (perhaps proto-writing)
• Jiahu symbols  – Peiligang culture (perhaps proto-writing)

Undeciphered manuscripts[edit]

A number of manuscripts from comparable recent past may be written in an invented writing system, a cipher of an existing writing system or may only be a hoax.

• Voynich manuscript
• Rohonc Codex
• Codex Seraphinianus
• Hamptonese
• Dorabella cipher

Other[edit]

Asemic writing is generally meaningless, though it sometimes contains ideograms or pictograms.

Phonetic alphabets[edit]

This section lists alphabets used to transcribe phonetic or phonemic sound; not to be confused with spelling alphabets like the ICAO spelling alphabet.

• International Phonetic Alphabet
• Deseret alphabet
• Unifon
• Americanist phonetic notation
• Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
• Shavian alphabet

Special alphabets[edit]

Alphabets may exist in forms other than visible symbols on a surface. Some of these are:

Tactile alphabets[edit]

• Braille
• Moon type
• New York Point
• Night writing

Manual alphabets[edit]

• Fingerspelling

For example:

• American Sign Language
• American manual alphabet
• Korean manual alphabet
• Cued Speech

Long-Distance Signaling[edit]

• International maritime signal flags
• Morse code
• Flag semaphore
• Optical telegraphy

Alternative alphabets[edit]

• Gregg Shorthand
• Initial Teaching Alphabet
• Pitman Shorthand
• Quikscript

Fictional writing systems[edit]

• Ath (alphabet)
• Aurebesh
• Cirth
• D'ni
• Goa'uld
• Hymmnos
• Klingon
• On Beyond Zebra!
• Quenya
• Sarati
• Sindarin
• Tengwar
• Unown

For animal use[edit]

• Yerkish uses "lexigrams" to communicate with non-human primates.

See also[edit]

• List of writing systems by adoption
• Artificial script
• List of languages by first written accounts
• Grapheme
• Writing system
• Unicode
• List of languages by writing system
• List of inventors of writing systems
• List of ISO 15924 codes

External links[edit]

• Omniglot: a guide to writing systems
• Ancient Scripts: Home:(Site with some introduction to different writing systems and group them into origins/types/families/regions/timeline/A to Z)
• Michael Everson's Alphabets of Europe
• Deseret Alphabet

References[edit]

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