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This section lists alphabets used to transcribe phonetic or phonemic sound; not to be confused with spelling alphabets like the ICAO spelling alphabet. Some of these are used for transcription purposes by linguists; others are pedagogical in nature or intended as general orthographic reforms.
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.
Learn more about the most commonly used alphabets and other writing systems in the world and the languages and people using them.
For the English alphabet in particular, see English alphabet. For the international technology conglomerate, see Alphabet Inc. For other uses, see Alphabet (disambiguation). An alphabetis a standard set of letterswritten to represent particular sounds in a spoken language.
Details of the structures of different types of writing systems - alphabets, abjads, abugidas, syllabaries and semanto-phonetic writing systems.
An alphabet consisting of 21 consonants and 5 vowels can generate 105 simple consonant-and-vowel syllables and more than 2,000 consonant-vowel-consonant syllables. In short, an alphabet can represent a full range of phonological differences.
The Greeks and Romans considered five different peoples as the possible inventors of the alphabet—the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Cretans, and Hebrews. Among modern theories are some that are not very different from those of ancient days.
Over the past millennia hundreds of different alphabets and scripts have been used all over the world. Some of them have disappeared while others still exist. On the outline map below you can see the distribution of the world’s most important scripts that are currently used.
Alphabets consist of three types: abjads only have letters for consonants, while pure alphabets have letters for both consonants and vowels. Abugidas use characters that correspond to consonant–vowel pairs.
Systematized writing was likely invented more than once, as it appeared independently in very different places: Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, around 3500-3000 BCE, Mesoamerica by 300 BCE and China around 1200 BCE.