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An alphabet is a standardized set of letters basic written symbols or graphemes each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which each character represents a syllable. Alphabets are classified according to how they indicate vowels:

The word "alphabet" came into Middle English from the Late Latin word Alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Ancient Greek Αλφάβητος Alphabetos, from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Alpha and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and meant ox and house respectively. There are dozens of alphabets in use today. Most of them are composed of lines (linear writing); notable exceptions are Braille, fingerspelling (Sign language), and Morse code.

Linguistic definition and context

The term alphabet prototypically refers to a writing system that has characters (graphemes) which represent both consonant and vowel sounds, even though there may not be a complete one-to-one correspondence between symbol and sound.

A grapheme is an abstract entity which may be physically represented by different styles of glyphs. There are many written entities which do not form part of the alphabet, including numerals, mathematical symbols, and punctuation. Some human languages are commonly written using a combination of logograms (which represent morphemes or words) and syllabaries (which represent syllables) instead of an alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters are two of the best-known writing systems with predominantly non-alphabetic representations.




Middle Eastern Scripts






European alphabets


Another notable script is Elder Futhark, which is believed to have evolved out of one of the Old Italic alphabets. Elder Futhark gave rise to a variety of alphabets known collectively as the Runic alphabets. The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from AD 100 to the late Middle Ages. Its usage was mostly restricted to engravings on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions have also been found on bone and wood. These alphabets have since been replaced with the Latin alphabet, except for decorative usage for which the runes remained in use until the 20th century.


Asian alphabets



In Koreamarker, the Hangul alphabet was created by Sejong the Great in 1443. Understanding of the phonetic alphabet of Mongolian Phagspa script aided the creation of a phonetic script suited to the spoken Korean language. Mongolian Phagspa script was in turn derived from the Brahmi script. Hangul is a unique alphabet in a variety of ways: it is a featural alphabet, where many of the letters are designed from a sound's place of articulation (P to look like widened mouth, L sound to look like tongue pulled in, etc.); its design was planned by the government of the time; and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way as Chinese characters, to allow for mixed script writing (one syllable always takes up one type-space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block).

Zhuyin (sometimes called Bopomofo) is a semi-syllabary used to phonetically transcribe Mandarin Chinese in the Republic of Chinamarker. After the later establishment of the People's Republic of Chinamarker and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin, the use of Zhuyin today is limited, but it's still widely used in Taiwanmarker where the Republic of China still governs. Zhuyin developed out of a form of Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s and has elements of both an alphabet and a syllabary. Like an alphabet the phonemes of syllable initials are represented by individual symbols, but like a syllabary the phonemes of the syllable finals are not; rather, each possible final (excluding the medial glide) is represented by its own symbol. For example, luan is represented as ㄌㄨㄢ (l-u-an), where the last symbol ㄢ represents the entire final -an. While Zhuyin is not used as a mainstream writing system, it is still often used in ways similar to a romanization system that is, for aiding in pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers and cell phones.



[[Image:800px-Writing systems worldwide1.png|500px|thumb|Alphabets: Latin , Latin and Arabic , Cyrillic , Latin and Cyrillic , Greek , Georgian , Armenian 
Abjads: Arabic , Hebrew 








Syllabaries typically contain 50 to 400 glyphs (though the Múra-Pirahã language of Brazilmarker would require only 24 if it did not denote tone, and Rotokas would require only 30), and the glyphs of logographic systems typically number from the many hundreds into the thousands. Thus a simple count of the number of distinct symbols is an important clue to the nature of an unknown script.

Alphabetic order

It is not always clear what constitutes a distinct alphabet. French uses the same basic alphabet as English, but many of the letters can carry additional marks, such as é, à, and ô. In French, these combinations are not considered to be additional letters. However, in Icelandic, the accented letters such as á, í, and ö are considered to be distinct letters of the alphabet. In Spanish, ñ is considered a separate letter, but accented vowels such as á and é are not. The ll and ch were also considered single letters, distinct from a single l followed by an l and c followed by an h, respectively, but in 1994 the Real Academia Española changed them so that ll is between lk and lm in the dictionary and ch is between cg and ci.Real Academia Española. "Spanish Pronto!: Spanish Alphabet." Spanish Pronto! 22 April 2007. January 2009 Spanish Pronto: Spanish > English Medical Translators.

In German, words starting with sch- (constituting the German phoneme /ʃ/) would be intercalated between words with initial sca- and sci- (all incidentally loanwords) instead of this graphic cluster appearing after the letter s, as though it were a single letter – a lexicographical policy which would be de rigueur in a dictionary of Albanian, i.e. dh-, gj-, ll-, rr-, th-, xh- and zh- (all representing phonemes and considered separate single letters) would follow the letters d, g, l, n, r, t, x and z respectively. Nor is, in a dictionary of English, the lexical section with initial th- reserved a place after the letter t, but is inserted between te- and ti-. German words with umlaut would further be alphabetized as if there were no umlaut at all – contrary to Turkish which allegedly adopted the Swedish graphemes ö and ü, and where a word like tüfek, “gun”, would come after tuz, “salt”, in the dictionary.

The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with æøå, whereas the Swedish and the Finnish ones conventionally put åäö at the end.


It is unknown whether the earliest alphabets had a defined sequence. Some alphabets today, such as Hanunoo, are learned one letter at a time, in no particular order, and are not used for collation where a definite order is required. However, a dozen Ugaritic tablets from the fourteenth century BC preserve the alphabet in two sequences. One, the ABGDE order later used in Phoenician, has continued with minor changes in Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Gothic, Cyrillic, and Latin; the other, HMĦLQ, was used in southern Arabia and is preserved today in Ethiopic. Both orders have therefore been stable for at least 3000 years.



The Phoenician letter names, in which each letter is associated with a word that begins with that sound, continue to be used in Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek. However, they were abandoned in Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin.

Orthography and spelling


  • A language may represent a given phoneme with a combination of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraph and three-letter groups are called trigraph. German uses the tesseragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme and "dsch" for , although the latter is rare. Kabardian also uses a tesseragraph for one of its phonemes.
  • A language may represent the same phoneme with two different letters or combinations of letters. An example is modern Greek which may write the phoneme in six different ways: "ι", "η", "υ", "ει", "οι" and "υι" (although the last is very rare).


Some national languages like Finnish, Turkish and Bulgarian have a very regular spelling system with a nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes. Strictly speaking, there is no word in the Finnish, Turkish and Bulgarian languages corresponding to the verb "to spell" (meaning to split a word into its letters), the closest match being a verb meaning to split a word into its syllables. Similarly, the Italian verb corresponding to 'spell', compitare, is unknown to many Italians because the act of spelling itself is almost never needed: each phoneme of Standard Italian is represented in only one way. However, pronunciation cannot always be predicted from spelling in cases of irregular syllabic stress. In standard Spanish, it is possible to tell the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa; this is because certain phonemes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is consistently pronounced. French, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy.


Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform in order to realign the writing with the contemporary spoken language. These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system itself, as when Turkeymarker switched from the Arabic alphabet to the Roman alphabet.


See also


  1. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary
  2. 27 pages.
  3. Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 74–75
  4. Coulmas (1989), p. 140-141
  5. Daniels and Bright (1996), pp. 92–96.
  6. “上親制諺文二十八字…是謂訓民正音(His majesty created 28 characters himself... It is Hunminjeongeum (original name for Hangul)”, 《세종실록 (The Annals of the Choson Dynasty : Sejong)》 25년 12월.


  • — (Overview of modern and some ancient writing systems).
  • —(Chapter 3 traces and summarizes the invention of alphabetic writing).
  • — Chapter 4 traces the invention of writing

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