Southeast Asia uses various non-Latin-based writing systems. The writing systems below are listed by language family.
Southeast Asia uses various non-Latin-based writing systems. The writing systems below are listed by language family.
Most Austronesian languages use Latin script today. Some non-Latin-based writing systems are listed below.
Many Southwestern Tai languages are written using Brāhmī-derived alphabets. Zhuang languages were traditionally written with Chinese characters, but are now usually written with romanized alphabets.
The Austroasiatic languages are a large language family spoken throughout Mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. These languages are natively spoken by the majority of the population in Vietnam and Cambodia, and by minority populations scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China. Approximately 117 million people speak an Austroasiatic language, of which more than two-thirds are Vietnamese speakers. Of the Austroasiatic languages, only Vietnamese, Khmer, and Mon have lengthy, established presences in the historical record. Only two are presently considered to be the national languages of sovereign states: Vietnamese in Vietnam, and Khmer in Cambodia. The Mon language is a recognized indigenous language in Myanmar and Thailand, while the Wa language is a "recognized national language" in the de facto autonomous Wa State within Myanmar. Santali is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. The remainder of the family's languages are spoken by minority groups and have no official status.
An abugida – sometimes also called alphasyllabary, neosyllabary, or pseudo-alphabet – is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary, similar to a diacritical mark. This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent, partial, or optional – in less formal contexts, all three types of the script may be termed "alphabets". The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which a single symbol denotes the combination of one consonant and one vowel.
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters in predictable ways, such as Greek ⟨α⟩ → ⟨a⟩, Cyrillic ⟨д⟩ → ⟨d⟩, Greek ⟨χ⟩ → the digraph ⟨ch⟩, Armenian ⟨ն⟩ → ⟨n⟩ or Latin ⟨æ⟩ → ⟨ae⟩.
The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India and are used by various languages in several language families in South, East and Southeast Asia: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Mongolic, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, and Tai. They were also the source of the dictionary order (gojūon) of Japanese kana.
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan. They are spoken by about 328 million people. This makes it the fifth-largest language family by number of speakers. Major Austronesian languages include Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Tagalog, Malagasy and Cebuano. According to some estimates, the family contains 1,257 languages, which is the second most of any language family.
There are several hundred languages in China. The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on Beijingese, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as Hanyu, that are spoken by 92% of the population. The Chinese languages are typically divided into seven major language groups, and their study is a distinct academic discipline. They differ as much from each other morphologically and phonetically as do English, German and Danish, but meanwhile share the same writing system (Hanzi) and are mutually intelligible in written form. There are in addition approximately 300 minority languages spoken by the remaining 8% of the population of China. The ones with greatest state support are Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang.
The Dongba, Tomba or Tompa or Mo-so symbols are a system of pictographic glyphs used by the ²dto¹mba of the Naxi people in southern China. In the Naxi language it is called ²ss ³dgyu 'wood records' or ²lv ³dgyu 'stone records'. The first artifacts with this script on them originate from approximately 30 AD.
Michael Everson is an American and Irish linguist, script encoder, typesetter, type designer and publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which he has published over one hundred books since 2006.
Surat Buhid is an abugida used to write the Buhid language. As a Brahmic script indigenous to the Philippines, it closely related to Baybayin and Hanunó'o. It is still used today by the Mangyans, found mainly on island of Mindoro, to write their language, Buhid, together with the Filipino latin script.
Tagbanwa is one of the scripts indigenous to the Philippines, used by the Tagbanwa and the Palawan people as their ethnic writing system.
Uniscribe is the Microsoft Windows set of services for rendering Unicode-encoded text, supporting complex text layout. It is implemented in the dynamic link library USP10.DLL. Uniscribe was released with Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer 5.0. In addition, the Windows CE platform has supported Uniscribe since version 5.0.
The Pallava script, or Pallava Grantha, is a style of Grantha script named after the Pallava dynasty of Southern India (Tamilakam) and is attested to since the 4th century CE. In India, the Pallava script evolved from Tamil-Brahmi. The Grantha script originated from the Pallava script. Pallava also spread to Southeast Asia and evolved into scripts such as Balinese, Baybayin, Javanese, Kawi, Khmer, Lanna, Lao, Mon–Burmese, New Tai Lue, Sundanese, and Thai. This script is the sister of the Vatteluttu script which was used to write Tamil and Malayalam in the past.
The Naxi language of southwestern China may be written in the syllabic geba script. There is also a Naxi tradition of pictographic symbols called dongba; this may sometimes be glossed with geba for clarification, since a dongba text may be intelligible only to its author.
The Lontara script, also known as the Bugis script, Bugis-Makassar script, or Urupu Sulapa’ Eppa’ "four-cornered letters", is one of Indonesia's traditional scripts developed in the South Sulawesi and West Sulawesi region. The script is primarily used to write the Buginese language, followed by Makassarese and Mandar. Closely related variants of Lontara are also used to write several languages outside of Sulawesi such as Bima, Ende, and Sumbawa. The script was actively used by several South Sulawesi societies for day-to-day and literary texts from at least mid-15th Century CE until the mid-20th Century CE, before its function was gradually supplanted by the Latin alphabet. Today the script is taught in South Sulawesi Province as part of the local curriculum, but with very limited usage in everyday life.
In the Unicode standard, a plane is a contiguous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal format (U+hhhhhh). Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), which contains most commonly used characters. The higher planes 1 through 16 are called "supplementary planes". The last code point in Unicode is the last code point in plane 16, U+10FFFF. As of Unicode version 16.0, five of the planes have assigned code points (characters), and seven are named.
Hanunoo, also rendered Hanunó'o, is one of the scripts indigenous to the Philippines and is used by the Mangyan peoples of southern Mindoro to write the Hanunó'o language.
Kulitan, also known as súlat Kapampángan and pamagkulit, is one of the various indigenous suyat writing systems in the Philippines. It was used for writing Kapampangan, a language mainly spoken in Central Luzon, until it was gradually replaced by the Latin alphabet.
Suyat is a collective name for the Brahmic scripts of Philippine ethnolinguistic groups. The term was suggested and used by cultural organizations in the Philippines to denote a unified neutral terminology for Philippine scripts.
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