Alphabets

An alphabet is a set of letters used to represent the basic sounds of a language in written form. In most alphabets, each letter corresponds to a phoneme, and the letters are arranged in a conventional order. Alphabets are distinct from abjads, which mainly represent consonants; abugidas, where consonants carry vowel markings; and syllabaries, where each symbol stands for a syllable.

The earliest widely influential alphabet is the Phoenician script, used around the eastern Mediterranean in the 1st millennium BCE. It inspired the Greek alphabet, which introduced explicit vowel letters. The Greek legacy gave rise to the Latin alphabet, spread with the Roman Empire and becoming the basis for many languages, including English. The Cyrillic alphabet, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th century, adapted Greek letters for Slavic languages and became prominent in Eastern Europe and northern Asia. Hangul, created in Korea in the 15th century, is a distinctive writing system that encodes spoken sounds with a featural design; it is sometimes described as an alphabet due to its clear separation of letters for vowels and consonants.

Other notable alphabets include Hebrew and Arabic scripts (often classified as abjads), and regional alphabets such as Armenian, Georgian, and Devanagari (an abugida). In modern usage, alphabets vary in the number of letters, case distinctions, and the use of diacritics. Writing direction also differs, with Latin and Cyrillic typically left-to-right, and Hebrew and Arabic right-to-left. Digital text relies on Unicode to encode the diverse set of alphabetic scripts worldwide.