Writing systems around the world
Posted by Filed under Culture
Source: alljapaneseallthetime.com
Here’s an interesting map showing some of the main writing systems used throughout the world, with the word “Wikipedia” written in each alphabet.
The source website is in Japanese, but you can still see the wide variety of writing systems used, from the Latin alphabet in North and South America and most of Europe, to the various pictograms and syllabic systems used in Asia (Chinese Hanyu, Korean Hangul, Japanese Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana), to Arabic scripts in the Middle East, to Cyrillic alphabets used in Russia and Eastern Europe, and many others besides.
Click on the image below to get the full sized version.
It’s amazing to see how many different scripts are used on the Indian subcontinent, where different (but similar) alphabets are used depending on where you are and which particular Indian language or dialect you use, including Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati and several others. Considering that both North and South America essentially only use the Latin alphabet, it’s interesting to see how some smaller regions have several scripts while huge areas use a single alphabet across many different languages!