Brahmiderived

Brahmi-derived refers to a broad family of writing systems descended from the ancient Brahmi script. Originating in the Indian subcontinent in the first millennium BCE, Brahmi gave rise to a wide range of scripts used for Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, and other languages, extending into Southeast Asia through historical contact and trade.

Most Brahmi-derived scripts are abugidas: each consonant carries an inherent vowel, which can be modified or muted by diacritics called matras, or by ligatures when consonants cluster. Vowels also appear as independent letters in many scripts. The family exhibits substantial regional variation, but shares common ancestry and structural principles.

Major branches include Devanagari, Bengali-Assamese, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, and Odia in the northern and eastern zones; and Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam in the southern zone. The Pallava script and its descendants played a particularly important role in the southern development (Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu), while the Nagari tradition (from Gupta-era variants) led to Devanagari and related scripts. Other scripts such as Sinhala and Gujarati sit within the broader Brahmi-derived heritage.

Today, Brahmi-derived scripts are used for dozens of languages across India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and parts of Southeast Asia. They continue to be central to education, publishing, and digital encoding, with each script represented in Unicode and widely used in government and media.