The Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabaries are the most widely used writing systems of their kind today. Studied by millions of students around the world who have become enchanted with Japanese pop culture, one has to ask the burning question: Can I use the kana to write my own language?...
Out of all the Southeast Asian scripts, the Myanmar script is very easy to identify. Most letters are composed of a combination of circles, circle-based arcs and/or loops joined by straight lines, with the occasional irregular twist thrown in for some variety, resulting in a very round script...
In the last century, a sizable amount of new writing systems have emerged from Africa. N’Ko is one of them: originally developed in the late 1940s by Sulemaana Kante for writing the Manding languages of West Africa, it is one of the most successful of its kind and has been adapted for a few other...
Greek was the first writing system ever devised in human history to indicate vowels. With thousands of years of history behind it, the Greek script conveys a sense of timeless elegance with its round lowercase letterforms, whose letters are widely used in the mathematics, science and engineering...
Arabic and Hebrew are the most well-known right-to-left scripts, but there are actually a few more RTL scripts in widespread use today. One of them is the Syriac script, a distant cousin of the Hebrew and Arabic scripts which is used to write the Neo-Aramaic languages spoken by Christian...
Africa is home to many unique writing systems. One of them is the Ge’ez fidel syllabary/abugida used to write the languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, which originally developed from a South Arabian offshoot of the highly influential Phoenician consonantal script (abjad) which is ancestral to both...
Hangul is a truly unique writing system in that it was created by humans almost from a blank slate, instead of evolving from an older pre-existing script. The script was created by King Sejong and his ministers of the Joseon dynasty of Korea in 1446 to improve literacy, being designed to represent...
The Hebrew script has a blocky and angular aesthetic that makes it easy to recognise, being the only other widely used right-to-left script in the world besides Arabic. In fact, this relationship is not just co-incidental, as both the Hebrew and Arabic scripts share the same origins: both were...
Indonesian is the standardised variety of the Malay language that is widely spoken across the Indonesian archipelago. Given that Malay was once written in the Indic Kawi script widely used across Maritime Southeast Asia from the 8th to the 16th century, it’s actually straightforward to write it in...
