consonantonly

Consonantonly is an adjective used in linguistics and typography to describe writing systems, transcriptions, or representations in which vowels are not written or are not systematically indicated. In such systems, the consonants carry the primary semantic content, while vowels are supplied by readers from context or morphological rules.

The term is closely associated with abjads, a class of scripts that encode consonants but typically omit most vowels. Classic examples include Arabic and Hebrew scripts, which usually write only consonants in everyday text. Vowels may be indicated with diacritics in specific contexts or early stages of schooling (harakat in Arabic, nikkud in Hebrew), but in standard writing they are often left implicit.

In linguistic analysis, consonant-only representations can appear as skeletons or transcriptions used to study consonant inventories, syllable structure, or historical sound changes. They can also arise in shorthand, experimental representations, or certain computational processes where vowel information is withheld or de-emphasized for simplification or pattern analysis.

Differences from fully vowel-inclusive systems highlight practical and cognitive considerations. Consonant-only scripts can reduce glyph variety and simplify certain kinds of processing, but they risk ambiguity without sufficient contextual cues or vowel restoration rules. For learners and readers, vowel information often aids pronunciation and meaning, so consonant-only forms rely on context, morphology, and repetition for disambiguation.

See also: abjad, diacritics, niqqud, harakat, orthography, phonology.