Brahmic

Brahmic is an adjective used to describe the Brahmi script and the family of writing systems descended from Brahmi. The Brahmic family, also known as Brahmi-derived scripts, is the principal group of scripts used to write languages of the Indian subcontinent and their descendants in parts of Southeast Asia. The term encompasses a wide range of scripts that share a common origin in ancient Brahmi.

Origin and spread: The Brahmi script is attested from the 3rd century BCE in inscriptions from ancient India. Over the ensuing centuries, Brahmi diversified into a large number of scripts, including Devanagari, Bengali-Assamese, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu, among others. These scripts are all abugidas—writing systems in which consonants convey a base syllable with an inherent vowel, while vowels and other features are indicated by diacritic marks or ligatures.

Characteristics: Brahmic scripts are typically written left to right and employ a system of consonant-vowel combinations that allows for complex ligatures and contextual shaping of characters. They encode a wide range of languages across different families, including Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, with variations in glyph shapes, spacing, and diacritics reflecting historical and regional developments.

Modern use and encoding: In contemporary times, Brahmic scripts remain the standard writing systems for many South Asian languages. They are encoded in the Unicode standard as separate blocks for each script (such as Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu), enabling digital representation and processing of texts across platforms and languages.