Writing systems around the world

While the Latin alphabet has a clear predominance in the ortography of most languages, there are quite a few interesting alphabet-based and logographic (symbol-based) scripts around the globe. Are you interested in learning which are the five most popular writing systems on Earth and how they are structured? Then keep on reading.



#1 The Latin Alphabet
We can’t simply start out with anything else rather than the Latin alphabet itself. Why? Because it’s clearly the most popular script in the entire world. Almost all European countries, as well as North and South America, Australia and rougly 70% of Africa use it as their primary writing utility. The first known texts using the archaic version of the latin alphabet (depictured below) date back to the VI century BC. Its origins can be traced back to the Greek alphabet, which on the other hand, was based on the Phoenician alphabet.



The standard modern Latin alphabet consists of 26 letters, however, the early versions contained less. Initially, there was no clear distinguishment between the letters “U” and “V”, which probably explains why the letter “W” is called “double U” in English (which, by the way is completely illogical if we compare it to the way it’s called in other languages, namely “double V”). Nonetheless, people around the globe have modified the Latin alphabet in order to much the properties of their own languages, which has resulted in adding tons of new letters with diacritics marks. The Viatnamese version of the Latin alphabet contains more than 130 accented letters! Can you imagine how tough it is to learn how to spell that language? And some people say English ortography is difficult…

#2 Hanzi or Kanji
More than 1.5 billion people living in East and South East Asia use the Chinese characters, which makes them the second most popular script on the globe. Developed during the times when Han dinasty ruled over China, the characters spread throughout the eastern part of the continent and became default writing system for numerous Asian languages, with an explicit focus on the meaning of the characters rather than their pronunciation. The literal interpretation of their name, 漢字 hanzi in Chinese and kanji in Japanese, actually means “the characters of Han”, signifying the great contribution that the dinasty made to the script.

I must say I find the traditional style of writing hanzi/kanji quite catchy - they are written in columns beginning from the upper right corner (refer to the image below). I have seen quite a few Japanese books whose cover is what we Europeans see as the back cover page. It’s funny how they read them “backwards” and flip the pages in the exact opposite way of which we are used to.



The total number of characters cannot be precisely defined, however, it is estimated to be around 50,000-60,000. While everyday Chinese uses roughly 3,000 and Japanese only around 2,000 characters, it is still pretty hard to memorize them, especially when considering that there is no known connection between the way they are written and the way they are pronounced. No wonder Chinese and Japanese are considered to be the two of the most difficult languages to master (just try to look for the meaning of a word in a paperback dictionary and you’ll know what I mean). On the other hand, if you learn one hanzi (kanji) a day, it will only take you 130 years to learn them all. Not that bad, huh?

#3 Devanagari
With more than 500 million people using the Devanagari script in different Indian languages, the Devanagari or simply the Nagari script accounts for the world’s third most popular writing system. Though to most foreigners it seems just as undecipherable as Chinese characters, Devanagari is simply an alphabet (sometimes called abugida), in which vowels are directly “attached” to consonants, forming a special unit of letters.

Though the history of Indian culture dates back to Antiquity, the Devanagari script emerged only in the X century AD to become the default script of Hindi language, the language with primary importance and key influence in today’s Indian society. Good news for the language learners - you only need to memorize 48 characters to be able to write in Hindi and the other languages that use Devanagari. On the other hand, there are probably dozens of spelling rules you will have to learn before becoming a literary man in the Indian society.

#4 The Arabic script
Alongside with Hebrew and Persian, the Arabic language is written from right to the left as opposed to the Latin alphabet, Devanagari and modern Hanzi/Kanji. The script is used by approximately 280 million people and it consists of 28 letters, each and every of which is a consonant. That’s quite unusual, isn’t it? Well, not really since the Hebrew alphabet and the Devanagari script also disregard vowels as distinct letters. What’s more there are no upper and lower case forms of the letters.

Anyway, what’s really interesting about Arabic language is that the letters look different depending on whether they are located in the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the word. It’s not only interesting, but also very confusing and difficult to learn, if you ask me. And not only if you ask me. The Turkish abandoned the Arabic script in the early XX century because it was blamed for being one of the main reasons for the spread of illiteracy around the country.

#5 The Cyrillic alphabet
This top five would not be very accurate if I dare to exclude the Cyrillic script from it. After all, a total number of 250 million people around the world are using it, mostly in Eastern Europe and Asia. Though the language with the largest number of speakers which uses the Cyrillic alphabet is Russian, it was initially created in the First Bulgarian Empire in the middle of the X century AD, making Bulgarian the first Slavic language with its own alphabet. The script was created while using the Greek alphabet as a basis, in pretty much the same way the early Latin alphabet emerged.



At present, the Cyrillic alphabet does not have an International standardized version like the Latin alphabet and therefore the total number of letters it contains cannot be defined. Each of the languages that use it has developed its own specific version of the script: for example Russian uses 33 letters and Bulgarian - 30 letters only. It actually looks similar to the Latin alphabet, as many letters with corresponding pronunciation are written exactly the same (for instance A, O, E, K, M, and T). However, this might get tricky since there are also some false friends: compare Latin “B” [b] to Cyrillic “В” [v], Latin “P” [p] to Cyrillic “Р” [r] and Latin “X” [ks] to Cyrillic “Х” [h]. But other than that, I think that’s the easiest script for any Western person to learn. At least compared to the other entries in this list…