After you have gotten as far as a basic grammar for your language, you may be interested in creating an orthography (or written system). Doing so may help you better describe the orthography in your prose (after all, you’ll have examples to draw from), or if you learn how to import custom fonts into your word processor then you may even be able to insert instances of your language into your novel. (David J Peterson teaches exactly how to do that in The Art of Language Invention, chapter 4.)

For the purpose of planning what written system your language will have, here are the types of orthographies that have developed for natural languages on earth. (“Glyphs,” when used below, refers to a written symbol that is part of an orthography.)

Complex Systems

The earliest developments of written language took the form of complex systems, such as Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. These can be difficult to explain because, from an outside perspective, complex systems appear cobbled together… and they kind of are. Complex systems are also difficult to learn and create because they normally have thousands of glyphs that get combined redundantly.

In a complex system, glyphs may represent solitary sounds, solitary syllables, groups of syllables, singular words, ideas or concepts, or they may only exist to modify the meaning of another glyph. Glyphs that represent sounds or syllables are often written with glyphs that directly represent the word or concept they portray; this redundancy may have helped ancient writers remember their own systems better than they otherwise would have.

Syllabaries

A syllabary can be seen as the next “step” after a complex system, although in truth syllabaries are very rare among recorded writing systems. Japanese katakana and hiragana are among the few examples of modern writing systems that are syllabaries.

“True” syllabaries have a glyph for every syllable that exists in the language. The result is a system with hundreds or thousands of glyphs. This can be difficult to memorize and read, so “practical” syllabaries often include a handful of glyphs that modify other glyphs, usually by adding or removing sounds from the syllable another glyph represents. This can cut down the total number of glyphs required to represent the language significantly, although the list usually still remains very long, potentially with hundreds of symbols.

Abugidas

An abugida can be thought of as the halfway point between a syllabary and an abjad, and are common in Indian and Southeast Asian languages. An abugida mostly features glyphs that represent syllables, but also many glyphs representing individual sounds, allowing for a system with far less glyphs than a syllabary (but still more than most abjads and alphabets). In addition, abugidas often include diacritics—or marks that modify a glyph’s appearance—to change the sound (or sounds) that the glyph represents, further reducing the total number of glyphs necessary to write the language.

Abjads

An abjad is a written system where glyphs almost entirely represent consonants (or groups of consonants) and vowels are normally left unwritten, the most famous example being Arabic. Speakers of the language are usually able to understand what vowels are intended based on context, but where ambiguity would exist (even in context) diacritics can be used to note which vowels should be used and where. (In most abjads, diacritics are largely used to teach the language, as fluent writers and readers don’t need them.) Abjads are most likely to develop with languages that have a relatively low inventory of vowels.

Alphabets

All of the languages of Europe write using an alphabet, which is an orthography that attempts to map a single sound to a single glyph. When first developed, alphabets accurately represented the sounds used to form each word quite well, but written language changes much slower than spoken language; centuries later, the result is some words that are spelled exactly as they sound, and some words with spellings that just have to be memorized. Regardless, alphabets tend to have the smallest number of glyphs out of all the writing systems.

It should also be noted that an alphabet is considered a very late-stage development in writing systems. On earth, alphabets are a relatively recent invention, entirely confined to European languages (as far as natural development is concerned). If you create a fantasy people who write using an alphabet, that suggests that they have a very long and well-developed writing history—and not just that, but a need to continue to simplify that writing system beyond any of the other options above.

If you go beyond written systems that naturally developed, there are many languages with alphabets constructed within the past century or so, including several Native American alphabets. These alphabets are generally the work of a passionate individual or a small team, and to my knowledge none have been widely adopted. Some are respected or held in high regard as a cultural item.

Pure Symbolic Systems

There are a lot of invented writing systems that don’t fit in the above categories. I’m not going to over most of them, but an example of an interesting invented writing system Blissymbolics—a “pure symbolic” system. (You can learn more about Blissymbolics—and its complicated history—in In the Land of Invented Languages.)

A “pure symbolic” orthography isn’t really an orthography, at least not in the traditional sense. Rather than having glyphs represent sounds, glyphs exclusively represent concepts and are combined to create more complicated concepts, the goal being to create a written language that “transcends the boundaries and limitations of spoken language, allowing for pure communication for all.” For example, in Blissymbolics the concept “emotion” is represented with a heart, while “happiness” is that heart followed by an arrow pointing upward—happiness is positive emotion.

Part of the reason pure symbolic systems don’t exist in natural languages could be related to how arbitrary they are (despite claims to the contrary from their creators). For example, why does a picture of a heart represent the concept of emotion in general and not a more specific emotion, like love? Ultimately, any system of language requires some memorization connecting symbol and concept. As a result, a pure symbolic orthography could be possible in your worldbuilding if the culture you made the orthography for memorized conventions of meaning with these symbols, although the end result would likely be very similar to a complex system.

(It should be noted that natural language is also arbitrary to some degree—the sounds you make when you read “love” have a clear meaning to you if you understand English because all English speakers agree on the pairing of those sounds with that concept, but those sounds don’t inherently have anything to do with love.)

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