Brahmicderived

Brahmicderived is an adjective used in linguistics and paleography to denote items descended from the Brahmi script or from the broader family of Brahmic scripts. The term signals a lineage in which writing systems, orthographic conventions, or lexical elements trace back to Brahmi, the ancient script of the Indian subcontinent, and its descendants.

The scope of Brahmicderived includes many scripts widely described as Brahmi-derived, such as Devanagari, Bengali-Assamese, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Oriya (Odia), Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Sinhala, among others in South Asia and parts of Southeast Asia. These scripts typically form an abugida system, in which consonants carry an inherent vowel that is modified by diacritics to express other vowels, and where conjunct consonants and ligatures are common.

Historically, Brahmi originated in the Indian subcontinent around the 3rd century BCE and diversified into a broad script family over centuries. The term Brahmicderived is often used in discussions of orthography, script evolution, and typology to group these related writing systems, though scholars more commonly encounter the phrasing Brahmi-derived or Brahmic scripts.

In linguistics, the Brahmicderived designation helps describe shared features and historical connections across languages that use Brahmi-based scripts, including representations of Sanskrit, Prakrit, and various regional languages. The term is complementary to more precise classifications and is most often encountered in introductory overviews or typological surveys rather than in formal script descriptions.