Alphabet

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are used over the world: ██ Latin Alphabet ██ Cyrillic alphabet ██ Arabic alphabet ██ Brahmic alphabets ██ Mixed: Latin and Cyrilic Alphabet ██ Mixed: Latin and Arabic Alphabet ██ Mixed: no alphabet and other alphabet ██ Other alphabet ██ Non-alphabetic writing systems">

Different alphabets are used over the world:

██ Latin Alphabet

██ Cyrillic alphabet

██ Arabic alphabet

██ Brahmic alphabets

██ Mixed: Latin and Cyrilic Alphabet

██ Mixed: Latin and Arabic Alphabet

██ Mixed: no alphabet and other alphabet

██ Other alphabet

██ Non-alphabetic writing systems

An alphabet is a writing system, a list of symbols for writing. A symbol in an alphabet is usually called a "letter". In an alphabet, each letter is a symbol for a sound.

The name alphabet comes from Alpha and Beta, the first two letters in the Greek alphabet.

The alphabet in this article is the Latin alphabet (or "Roman alphabet"). it was first used in Ancient Rome to write Latin. Today many languages also use the Latin alphabet, and it is the most used alphabet.

[edit] Alphabets

A list of alphabets and examples of the languages they are used for:

Latin alphabet (or "Roman alphabet")
Greek alphabet, used for Greek
Arabic alphabet, used for Arabic and Farsi
Hebrew alphabet, used for Hebrew and Yiddish
Cyrillic alphabet, which is based on the Greek alphabet, used for Russian and Bulgarian
Hangul, used for Korean

[edit] Other writing systems

Other writing systems do not use symbols that mean a sound, but symbols that mean a word or a syllable. In the past such writing systems were used by many cultures, but today they are almost only used by languages people speak in Asia.

The Chinese writing is called "pictographic" because their writing evolved from using pictures to represent words or ideas.
Japanese uses a mix of the Chinese writing and two syllabaries called hiragana and katakana. Modern Japanese often also uses romaji, which is the Japanese syllabary written in the Roman alphabet.

A syllabary is a system of writing that is similar to an alphabet. A syllabary uses one symbol to indicate each syllable of a word, instead of one symbol for each letter of the word. For example, a syllabary would use one symbol to mean the syllable "ga", instead of two letters of the alphabet "g" and "a".