The world’s major writing systems

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Writing first emerged approximately 6 thousand years ago, with the first evidence being clay tablets from western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system (Mesopotamia). The Phoenicians emerged the earliest alphabetic writing. The Greeks adopted that alphabet, with changes to adapt the sound system of Greek. In turn, the Romans adopted and changed the Greek alphabet to suit the sounds of Latin. Most modern writing systems use the Roman alphabet, although several other scripts have observed widespread use, including Cyrillic, Arabic, and Devanagari.

Writing systems can be classified into three main types: alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. They, in turn, can be divided into many subclasses of each type.

In the alphabetical writing system, a regular set of letters express tongue sounds (typically less than 100 symbols). In a syllabary, each symbol relates to a syllable. In a logography, each sign depicts a semantic unit, such as a word or morpheme. Abjad writing systems differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, and in abugidas or alphasyllabaries, each character represents a consonant-vowel pairing.

Alphabetical:

• Latin
• Cyrillic
• Greek
• Armenian
• Georgian
• Hangul

Logographic and Syllabic

• Hanzi (Chinese characters)
• Kana (Japanese writing system)/ Kanji (adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in the Japanese writing system)
• Hanja (the Korean name for Chinese characters)

Abjad

• Perso – Arabic
• Hebrew

Abugida

• North Indic (descender from the Brahmi script of ancient Indi)
• South Indic
• Ethiopic
• Thaana (Maldivian language)
• Canadian syllabic (writing systems based on consonant-vowel pairs created by James Evans to write several indigenous Canadian languages)