Types Of Writing Language

Language is essential to communicate and writing helps us to communicate better and when the two are clubbed, we are a given a whole list of types of writing languages. Written language is opposed to spoken language. Written language communicates through writing or graphic display.

Delving into the types of writing languages, it is interesting to point out to the readers that out of an estimated 6800 languages spoken in the world, about 2500 of these languages are written! From these, the most common are the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet and Han characters. The first to be discussed is Latin alphabet. It is also known as the Roman alphabet and surfaces as the most common and widely used writing system in the whole world. This particular type of writing language includes Greek alphabets as well. Many Celtic, Slavic, Germanic and Baltic languages tailored the Latin alphabet for their own use. Most of the European languages used today use Roman alphabet to communicate verbally or through writing. The English language too adopted the Latin alphabet, thus replacing the Anglo-Saxon alphabet which was widely used in the ancient times.

The next writing system that comes under the types of writing languages is the Cyrillic alphabet or commonly known as the Cyrillic script. This is peculiar to the Slavic countries including Russia, Serbia, Ukriane, Bulgaria among others. This alphabet was born out of the Greek script and ancient Slavic Glagolitic alphabet. With the advent of time, this languageunderwent changes and today it is known as the Cyrillic script. It is believed that the Greek brothers and Christian missionaries brought this writing language to them.

The third language system is the Han Characters. They are also called the Chinese characters. It is pertinent to note that this particular writing language is different from both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets mentioned earlier. These characters are logo-syllabic which means that each alphabet stands for a single syllable word as opposed to the phonetic parts of a word. The written Chinese language is considered as one of the most ancient forms of written language. It is interesting to know that some of these characters are also used in other languages! Japanese and Korean respectively, though to a certain extent, they do differ.

The list of types of writing languages is increasing steadily as more spoken languages are being incorporated in the category of writing language. Many languages are striving to gain popularity. For instance, Greenlandic language is an Eskimo-Aleut one which is spoken by just about 57,00 Greenlandic Inuit humans in Greenland. Zulu, a language of the Zulu tribe of South Africa is written using the Latin alphabet. Xhosa is one of the official languages of South Africa. It also uses the Latin alphabet though it is important to point out that tones are not indicated in its written form.

Languages are an interesting aspect from our multiple mediums of communication.

TypesOf.com’ thus gives you a list of types of writing languages. Hope it was helpful.