abugida

An abugida is a writing system in which each basic character denotes a consonant with a default vowel. Other vowels are indicated by adding diacritics to the consonant’s form or by altering the consonant itself. Independent vowel letters exist for situations where a syllable begins with a vowel or when a vowel occurs alone. In practice, syllables that share the same consonant but have different vowels are visually connected through their related base forms.

This structure places abugidas between alphabets, where letters represent individual phonemes, and syllabaries, where each symbol represents a whole syllable with any vowel. In abugidas, syllables built on the same consonant but with different vowels are treated as a family of related signs, maintaining a recognizable visual core.

Origin and spread: Abugidas originated from the Brahmi family of scripts in ancient India and spread across South Asia and nearby regions. Major descendants include Devanagari (used for Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit), Bengali–Assamese script, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam. The Ge’ez script of Ethiopia and Eritrea is also described as an abugida, illustrating a parallel development outside the Indian subcontinent.

Orthography and typography: The repertoire of glyphs grows with the range of vowels. Vowel modification marks can appear above, below, or around the base consonant and may combine into ligatures. Independent vowels are used when no consonant precedes or when writing in isolation. In modern encoding, Unicode represents abugidas with a mix of base consonant code points and combining diacritic marks for vowels.