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The World’s Writing Systems, catalogue of 294 writing systems, each with a typographic reference glyph and Unicode status; Deseret Alphabet; ScriptSource – a dynamic, collaborative reference to the writing systems of the world
This is not an exhaustive list of all the languages written with each writing system, but mainly the ones that appear on Omniglot. The most widely used writing systems are the Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets.
An alphabetical index of the alphabets and other writing systems featured on Omniglot.
Alphabets, or phonemic alphabets, are sets of letters, usually arranged in a fixed order, each of which represents one or more phonemes, both consonants and vowels, in the language they are used to write. In some case combinations of letters are used to represent single phonemes, as in the English sh, ch and th.
(Top) General properties. Basic terminology. Text, writing, reading and orthography. Grapheme and phoneme. Glyph, sign and character. Complete and partial writing systems. History. Proto-writing systems. Invention of writing systems. Alphabetic writing. Functional classification. Logographic systems. Syllabaries. Alphabets. Featural systems.
Alphabetic writing systems represent the phonological structure of the language. The smallest pronounceable segment of speech is a syllable, but a syllable may be analyzed into the distinctive underlying constituents called phonemes.
Moreover, for languages such as Chinese and Japanese, which have simple syllabic structures and a great number of homophones, a writing system that depended on phonological structure, such as a syllabary or an alphabet, would be extremely inefficient.
