Scripts | Global Numud

Scripts of the World

While world has thousands of languages, the number of scripts used is much lower. The main scripts were expanded by religions, empires or both. They were adopted to write previously unwritten languages. Top 10 most popular writing systems are used by well over 90% of the world population.

Scripts are usually divided into multiple families: Sinitic, Indian/Brahmic and Western. Each family was supposedly started by people who did not know other writing systems (although this is disputed). As the time went by the original script of the family evolved and changed into different forms used in different areas (and for different languages)

Moreover, the scripts are divided into categories by what their characters mean. Each character may mean either entire word, a syllable, a modifiable syllable, any phoneme (like in Latin script) or consonant only phoneme. Based on this criteria the script is called either alphabet (character=phoneme), abdjad (character=consonant), abugida (character=modifiable syllable), syllabary (character=sylable).

Western	Middle Eastern	South Asian	East Asian	Other
Latin script	Arabic script	Devanagari	Chinese script	Other scripts
Cyrillic script	Other Middle Eastern	Bengali script	Japanese script
Other European		Other Indian/SE Asian	Korean script

Latin script

Latin script is the most popular in the world, used by 38,5% of all human beings in 51% land. It is the prime script for sciences. Many signs in non-Latin scripts are transliterated into Latin as well.

Chinese script

Chinese script is used mainly in China, but this means 23% of all world’s people and 5% its territory. Chinese script has thousand of different characters, each of them of the same width and height, consisting of many strokes.

Arabic script

Arabic script is closely associated with Islam. Holy Quran must be read in Arabic thus people who converted into Islam learned the language and the script. It is thus used to write the languages of most muslim nations.

Devanagari

Devenagari is the prime script of India used for its official Hindi language. India has many other scripts but they are all similar to Devanagari in nature and history.

Bengal script

Bengal script is mainly used for the Bengal language and nearby minorities of Bangladesh/India. This language has over 250 million speakers however, putting Bengal script among the most popular ones in the world.

Cyrillic script

Cyrillic is the script of many Eastern European Orthodox nations, most famously the Russians. Cyrillic is similar to Latin and some letters even look the same (but there are more of them).

Japanese script (katakana, hiragana)

While the Japanese script is used by just a single nation (~2% world population), the economic power and cultural influence of Japan placed it well among the world’s most-recognizable writing systems.

Korean script (hangul, chosongul)

Korean script has been purposefully invented for a single language (Korean). It is among the easiest scripts to learn. Some 63 million people (1% world total) uses it.

Minor European scripts (Greek, Georgian, Armenian)

Just three European nations have their own scripts that are neither Latin nor Cyrillic. These are Armenians, Georgians and Greeks. All three scripts are in a sense descended from the Ancient Greek cities which gave Europe much of its philosophy and art.

Minor Middle Eastern scripts (Hebrew, Syriac, Mongol)

In the modern Middle East dominated by Arabic Muslims there remains “islands” of pre-Islamic faiths and ethnicities which have their own scripts. Most famous among them are Jews (Hebrew script) but there are also Assyrians (Syriac script) and Tana. All these scripts are related.

Minor Indian and Southeast Asian scripts

Most of the world’s scripts are used in India and Southeastern Asia. Nearly every respectable language has its own script in this region. All Indian/Southeast Asian scripts are however quite similar to each other.

Other scripts

Some of the world’s minor scripts are so unique that they are hard to classify.