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A 'list of writing systems' (or 'scripts'), classified according to some common distinguishing features.
See 'Writing system' for more information about the different kinds of writing systems. See also grapheme, a technical term used to refer to the individual base constituents of any given writing system.
The usual name of the script is given first (and 'bolded'); 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.

Contents

Pictographic/ideographic writing systems

Logographic writing systems

Consonant-based logographies

Syllable based logographies

Logographies based on Chinese

Syllabaries

Part syllabic, part alphabetic scripts

Segmental scripts

Abjads

True alphabets

Linear nonfeatural alphabets

Featural linear alphabets

Manual alphabets

Other non-linear alphabets

Abugidas

Abugidas of the Brāhmī family

Other Abugidas

Final consonant-diacritic abugidas

Vowel-based abugidas

Undeciphered systems thought to be writing

Undeciphered manuscripts

Other

Phonetic alphabets (linguistics)

Phonetic alphabets (military)

Special alphabets

Tactile alphabets

Manual alphabets

Long-Distance Signaling

Alternative alphabets

Fictional writing systems

See also

References

Pictographic/ideographic writing 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 ''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. 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

★ 'Dongba' — Naxi

★ 'Míkmaq hieroglyphic writing' — Míkmaq - Does have phonetic components, however.
There are also symbol systems used to represent things other than language. Some of these are

★ 'Blissymbols' - A constructed ideographic script used primarily in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC).

★ 'DanceWriting'

★ 'New Epoch Notation Painting'

Logographic writing systems

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

★ 'Hieroglyphic', 'Hieratic', and 'Demotic' — writing systems of Ancient Egypt

Syllable based logographies

★ 'Anatolian hieroglyphs' — Luwian

★ 'Cuneiform' — Sumerian, Akkadian, other Semitic languages, Elamite, Hittite, Luwian, Hurrian, and Urartian

★ 'Hanzi' — Chinese, Japanese (called 'Kanji'), Korean (called 'Hanja'), Vietnamese (called 'Han tu', a variant is called 'Chu nho', both obsolete)

★ 'Mayan' — Chorti, Yucatec, and other Classic Maya languages

★ 'Yi (classical)' — various Yi/Lolo languages

★ 'Adinkra' — various Akan languages

Logographies based on Chinese

★ 'Geba' — Naxi

★ 'Jurchen' — Jurchen

★ 'Khitan large script' — Khitan

★ 'Tangut' — Tangut

★ 'Zhuang' — Zhuang

Syllabaries

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' — Mycenean Greek

★ 'Hiragana' — Japanese

★ 'Katakana' — Japanese

★ 'Kikakui' - Mende

★ 'Kpelle' — Kpelle

★ 'Linear B' — Mycenean Greek

★ 'Man'yōgana' - Japanese

★ 'Nü Shu' — Yao

★ 'Vai' — Vai

★ 'Yi (modern)' — various Yi/Lolo languages

Part syllabic, part alphabetic scripts

In 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].

★ 'Iberian' — Celtiberian and other languages

★ 'Old Persian Cuneiform' — Old Persian

Segmental scripts

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.

★ 'Aramaic'

★ 'Arabic' — Arabic, Azeri, Baluchi, Kashmiri, Pashtun, Persian, Punjabi, Sindhi, Uighur, Urdu, and the languages of many other Muslim peoples

★ 'Dhives akuru' — Dhivehi

★ 'Estrangelo' — Syriac

★ 'Hebrew Square Script' — Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish languages

★ 'Jawi' - Arabic, Malay

★ 'Nabataean' — the Nabataeans of Petra

★ 'Pahlavi script' — Middle Persian

★
★ 'Parthian'

★
★ 'Psalter'

★ 'Phoenician' — Phoenician and other Caananite languages

★ 'Proto-Canaanite

★ 'Sabaean'

★
★ 'South Arabian' — Sabaic, Qatabanic, Himyaritic, and Hadhramautic

★ 'Sogdian'

★ 'Samaritan (Old Hebrew)' — Aramaic, Arabic, and Hebrew

★ 'Tifinagh' — Tuareg

★ 'Ugaritic' — Ugaritic, Hurrian

True alphabets

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

Linear nonfeatural alphabets

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

★ 'Arabic (for Kurdish, Uyghur)' — Kurdish

★ 'Armenian' — Armenian

★ 'Avestan alphabet' — Avestan language

★ 'Beitha Kukju' — Albanian

★ '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 Mingrelian. Variants include 'Mkhedruli, Khutsuri, Asomtavruli, Nuskhuri'

★ 'Glagolitic' — Old Church Slavonic

★ 'Gothic' — Gothic

★ 'Greek' — Greek

★ 'International Phonetic Alphabet'

★ 'Latin alphabet' or 'Roman alphabet' — 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' (pronounced ) — Gaelic, Britannic, Pictish

★ 'Hungarian Runes' — Hungarian

★ 'Old Italic alphabet' — Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian

★ 'Old Permic (or ''Abur'')' — Komi

★ 'Orkhon "runes"' — Turkic

★ 'Osmanya' — Somali

★ 'Runic alphabet' — Germanic languages

★ 'Ol Cemet'' — Santali

★ 'Tai Lue' — Lue

★ 'Vah' — Bassa

★ 'Zhuyin (Bopomofo)' — used as a phonetic gloss in Taiwan, and as an alphabet for several Formosan languages

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.

★ 'Gregg Shorthand'

★ 'Hangul' — Korean

★ 'Shavian alphabet'

★ 'Tengwar' (a fictional script)

★ 'Visible Speech' (a phonetic script)

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.

★ 'American (Usonian) 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)

★ 'Israli 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

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)

★ 'American Morse code' (defunct)

★ 'Semaphore' — made by moving hand-held flags)

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.

Abugidas of the Brāhmī family

★ 'Brāhmī' — Prakrit, Sanskrit

★ 'Ahom'

★ 'Balinese'

★ 'Batak' — Toba and other Batak languages

★ 'Baybayin' — Ilokano, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Tagalog, Bikol languages, Visayan languages, and possibly other Philippine languages

★ 'Bengali' — Bengali, Assamese

★ 'Buhid'

★ 'Burmese' — Burmese, Karen languages, Mon

★ '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

★ 'Kannada' — Kannada, Tulu

★ 'Khmer'

★ 'Lao'

★ 'Limbu'

★ 'Lontara’' — Buginese, Makassar, and Mandar

★ 'Malayalam'

★ 'Modi' — Marathi

★ 'Oriya'

★ 'Phags-pa' — Mongolian, Chinese, and other languages of the Yuan Dynasty Mongol Empire

★ 'Ranjana' — Newari

★ 'Sinhala'

★ 'Sourashtra'

★ 'Soyombo'

★ 'Syloti Nagri' - Sylheti

★ 'Tagbanwa' — Languages of Palawan

★ 'Tai Dam'

★ 'Tamil'

★ 'Telugu'

★ 'Thai'

★ 'Tibetan'

★ 'Tocharian'

Other Abugidas

★ '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

★ 'Meroitic' — Meroë

★ 'Pitman Shorthand'

★ 'Pollard script' — Miao

★ 'Sorang Sompeng' — Sora

★ 'Thaana' — Dhivehi

★ 'Thomas Natural Shorthand'

★ 'Varang Kshiti' — Ho

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, representing [o] with an under-ring, and final [k] with an over-cross, [sok] would written as .

★ 'Róng' — Lepcha

Vowel-based abugidas

In a couple 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

Undeciphered systems thought to be writing

Main articles: Undeciphered writing systems

These writing 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. In others, such as the Phaistos Disc, there is little hope of progress unless further texts are found. 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 Vinča and other cases the system, although symbolic, may turn out to not be writing.

★ 'Byblos' — the city of Byblos

★ 'Eskayan' — Bohol, Philippines

★ 'Isthmian' (apparently logosyllabic)

★ 'Indus script' — Indus Valley Civilization

★ 'Khipu' — Inca Empire (very possibly not writing)

★ 'Khitan small script' — Khitan

★ 'Linear A' (a syllabary) — Minoan

★ 'Mixtec' — Mixtec (perhaps pictographic)

★ 'Vinča' (very possibly not writing)

★ 'Olmec' — Olmec civilization (possibly the oldest Mesoamerican script)

★ 'Phaistos Disc' (a unique text)

★ 'Proto-Elamite' — Elam (nearly as old as Sumerian)

★ 'Rongorongo' — Rapa Nui (perhaps a syllabary)

★ 'Wadi el-Ħôl & Proto-Sinaitic' (likely an abjad)

★ 'Zapotec' — Zapotec (another old Mesoamerican script)

★ 'Banpo Script' -Yangshao culture

★ 'Jiahu Script' -Peiligang culture

★ 'Iberian Script' -Iberians (sound known)

Undeciphered manuscripts

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'

Other

Phonetic alphabets (linguistics)

:''This section lists phonetic alphabets used to transcribe phonetic sound.'
# International Phonetic Alphabet
# Deseret alphabet
# UNIFON
# Americanist phonetic notation
# Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
# Shavian alphabet

Phonetic alphabets (military)

:''This section lists phonetic alphabets used to clarify word spellings in radio communication.''
# NATO phonetic alphabet
# Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet
# Japanese phonetic alphabet
# RAF phonetic alphabet
# LAPD phonetic alphabet
# Finnish armed forces' radio alphabet
# Hellenic phonetic alphabet
# German phonetic alphabet -- see German alphabet

Special alphabets

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

Tactile alphabets

# Braille
# Moon type
# New York Point

Manual alphabets

# Fingerspelling
For example:
# American Sign Language
# Korean manual alphabet
# Cued Speech

Long-Distance Signaling

# International maritime signal flags
# Morse code
# Semaphore

Alternative alphabets

# Gregg Shorthand
# Initial Teaching Alphabet
# Pitman Shorthand
# Quikscript

Fictional writing systems

# Aurebesh
# D'ni
# Goa'uld
# Klingon
# Tengwar
# Ath (alphabet)

See also

★ Artificial script

★ List of languages by first written accounts

★ Genealogy of scripts derived from Proto-Sinaitic

★ List of languages by writing system

★ List of inventors of writing systems

★ List of ISO 15924 codes

★ - computer representations of alphabets, especially Unicode

★

References

★ 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