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56-399: Ixtenco Otomi , also known as Tlaxcala Otomi , is a native American language spoken in the town of San Juan Bautista Ixtenco in the state of Tlaxcala , Mexico. It has been classified as Eastern Otomi by Lastra (2006). Lastra considers Ixtenco Otomí to be a very conservative dialect. In Tlaxcala, Otomí was also formerly spoken in nearby Huamantla , located to the north (Carrasco 1950). To

112-465: A featural system uses symbols representing sub-phonetic elements—e.g. those traits that can be used to distinguish between and analyse a language's phonemes, such as their voicing or place of articulation . The only prominent example of a featural system is the hangul script used to write Korean, where featural symbols are combined into letters, which are in turn joined into syllabic blocks. Many scholars, including John DeFrancis (1911–2009), reject

168-610: A Dios ) Mexico Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto) , Mexico Belize North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region , Nicaragua Honduras ( Atlántida , Colón , Gracias a Dios ) United States Northwest Territories , Canada Mexico Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community , United States Mexico Writing system Writing systems are generally classified according to how its symbols, called graphemes , generally relate to units of language. Phonetic writing systems, which include alphabets and syllabaries , use graphemes that correspond to sounds in

224-576: A characterization of hangul as a featural system—with arguments including that Korean writers do not themselves think in these terms when writing—or question the viability of Sampson's category altogether. As hangul was consciously created by literate experts, Daniels characterizes it as a "sophisticated grammatogeny " —a writing system intentionally designed for a specific purpose, as opposed to having evolved gradually over time. Other grammatogenies include shorthands developed by professionals and constructed scripts created by hobbyists and creatives, like

280-416: A component related to the character's meaning, and a component that gives a hint for its pronunciation. A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent either syllables or moras —a unit of prosody that is often but not always a syllable in length. The graphemes used in syllabaries are called syllabograms . Syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple syllable structure, since

336-481: A different symbol is needed for every syllable. Japanese, for example, contains about 100 moras, which are represented by moraic hiragana . By contrast, English features complex syllable structures with a relatively large inventory of vowels and complex consonant clusters —making for a total of 15–16,000 distinct syllables. Some syllabaries have larger inventories: the Yi script contains 756 different symbols. An alphabet

392-418: A five-fold classification of writing systems, comprising pictographic scripts, ideographic scripts, analytic transitional scripts, phonetic scripts, and alphabetic scripts. In practice, writing systems are classified according to the primary type of symbols used, and typically include exceptional cases where symbols function differently. For example, logographs found within phonetic systems like English include

448-408: A set of defined graphemes, collectively called a script . The concept of the grapheme is similar to that of the phoneme used in the study of spoken languages. Likewise, as many sonically distinct phones may function as the same phoneme depending on speaker, dialect, and context, many visually distinct glyphs (or graphs ) may be identified as the same grapheme. These variant glyphs are known as

504-542: A spoken language, this functions as literacy in a second, acquired language. A single language (e.g. Hindustani ) can be written using multiple writing systems, and a writing system can also represent multiple languages. For example, Chinese characters have been used to write multiple languages throughout the Sinosphere —including the Vietnamese language from at least the 13th century, until their replacement with

560-493: Is a set of letters , each of which generally represent one of the segmental phonemes in a spoken language. However, these correspondences are rarely uncomplicated, and spelling is often mediated by other factors than just which sounds are used by a speaker. The word alphabet is derived from alpha and beta , the names for the first two letters in the Greek alphabet . An abjad is an alphabet whose letters only represent

616-438: Is a visual and tactile notation representing language . The symbols used in writing correspond systematically to functional units of either a spoken or signed language . This definition excludes a broader class of symbolic markings, such as drawings and maps. A text is any instance of written material, including transcriptions of spoken material. The act of composing and recording a text may be referred to as writing , and

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672-468: Is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one. In an abugida, there may be a sign for k with no vowel, but also one for ka (if a is the inherent vowel), and ke is written by modifying the ka sign in a consistent way with how la would be modified to get le . In many abugidas, modification consists of

728-451: Is defined as a potentially permanent means of recording information, then these systems do not qualify as writing at all, since the symbols disappear as soon as they are used. Instead, these transient systems serve as signals . Writing systems may be characterized by how text is graphically divided into lines, which are to be read in sequence: For example, English and many other Western languages are written in horizontal rows that begin at

784-604: Is limited to certain regions where the languages are most spoken. Although sometimes enshrined in constitutions as official, the languages may be used infrequently in de facto official use. Examples are Quechua in Peru and Aymara in Bolivia, where in practice, Spanish is dominant in all formal contexts. In the North American Arctic region, Greenland in 2009 elected Kalaallisut as its sole official language. In

840-586: Is no evidence of contact between China and the literate peoples of the Near East, and the Mesopotamian and Chinese approaches for representing aspects of sound and meaning are distinct. The Mesoamerican writing systems , including Olmec and the Maya script , were also invented independently. The first known alphabetic writing appeared before 2000 BC, and was used to write a Semitic language spoken in

896-650: Is the Brahmic family of scripts, however, which includes nearly all the scripts used in India and Southeast Asia. The name abugida is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Geʽez script used in some contexts. It was coined as a linguistic term by Peter T. Daniels ( b.  1951 ), who borrowed it from the Ethiopian languages. Originally proposed as a category by Geoffrey Sampson ( b.  1944 ),

952-996: Is used in various models either as a synonym for "morphographic", or as a specific subtype where the basic unit of meaning written is the word . Even with morphographic writing, there remains a correspondence between graphemes and the sounds of speech, but the pronunciation values of the units of meaning is not what is being encoded firstly by the writing system. Many classifications define three primary categories, where phonographic systems are subdivided into syllabic and alphabetic (or segmental ) systems. Syllabaries use symbols called syllabograms to represent syllables or moras . Alphabets use symbols called letters that correspond to spoken phonemes—or more technically to diaphonemes . Alphabets are generally classified into three subtypes, with abjads having letters for consonants , pure alphabets having letters for both consonants and vowels , and abugidas having characters that correspond to consonant–vowel pairs. David Diringer proposed

1008-440: Is used throughout the study of writing systems, the precise interpretations of and definitions for concepts often vary depending on the theoretical model employed by the researcher. A grapheme is the basic functional unit of a writing system. Graphemes are generally defined as minimally significant elements which, when taken together, comprise the set of symbols from which texts may be constructed. All writing systems require

1064-428: The allographs of a grapheme: For example, the lowercase letter ⟨a⟩ may be represented by the double-storey | a | and single-storey | ɑ | shapes, or others written in cursive, block, or printed styles. The choice of a particular allograph may be influenced by the medium used, the writing instrument used, the stylistic choice of the writer, the preceding and succeeding graphemes in

1120-530: The Indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples . Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now extinct . The Indigenous languages of the Americas are not all related to each other; instead, they are classified into a hundred or so language families and isolates , as well as a number of extinct languages that are unclassified due to

1176-495: The Latin alphabet and Chinese characters , glyphs are made up of lines or strokes. Linear writing is most common, but there are non-linear writing systems where glyphs consist of other types of marks, such as in cuneiform and Braille . Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya script were often painted in linear outline form, but in formal contexts they were carved in bas-relief . The earliest examples of writing are linear: while cuneiform

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1232-518: The Quechuan languages , Aymara , Guarani , and Nahuatl , which had millions of active speakers, to many languages with only several hundred speakers. After pre-Columbian times, several Indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas, based on European, Indigenous and African languages. The European colonizing nations and their successor states had widely varying attitudes towards Native American languages. In Brazil, friars learned and promoted

1288-662: The Sinai Peninsula . Most of the world's alphabets either descend directly from this Proto-Sinaitic script , or were directly inspired by its design. Descendants include the Phoenician alphabet ( c.  1050 BC ), and its child in the Greek alphabet ( c.  800 BC ). The Latin alphabet , which descended from the Greek alphabet, is by far the most common script used by writing systems. Several approaches have been taken to classify writing systems, with

1344-560: The Tengwar script designed by J. R. R. Tolkien to write the Elven languages he also constructed. Many of these feature advanced graphic designs corresponding to phonological properties. The basic unit of writing in these systems can map to anything from phonemes to words. It has been shown that even the Latin script has sub-character features. In linear writing , which includes systems like

1400-787: The Tupi language . In many Spanish colonies, Spanish missionaries often learned local languages and culture in order to preach to the natives in their own tongue and relate the Christian message to their Indigenous religions. In the British American colonies, John Eliot of the Massachusetts Bay Colony translated the Bible into the Massachusett language , also called Wampanoag, or Natick (1661–1663); he published

1456-408: The ampersand ⟨&⟩ and the numerals ⟨0⟩ , ⟨1⟩ , etc.—which correspond to specific words ( and , zero , one , etc.) and not to the underlying sounds. A logogram is a character that represents a morpheme within a language. Chinese characters represent the only major logographic writing systems still in use: they have historically been used to write

1512-404: The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet (with these graphemes corresponding to various phonemes), punctuation marks (mostly non-phonemic), and a handful of other symbols, such as numerals. Writing systems may be regarded as complete if they are able to represent all that may be expressed in the spoken language, while a partial writing system cannot represent

1568-622: The varieties of Chinese , as well as Japanese , Korean , Vietnamese , and other languages of the Sinosphere . As each character represents a single unit of meaning, many different logograms are required to write all the words of a language. If the logograms do not adequately represent all meanings and words of a language, written language can be confusing or ambiguous to the reader. Logograms are sometimes conflated with ideograms , symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas; most linguists now reject this characterization: Chinese characters are often semantic–phonetic compounds, which include

1624-511: The 11th century (with the Nordic settlement of Greenland and failed efforts in Newfoundland and Labrador ) and the end of the 15th century (the voyages of Christopher Columbus ). Several Indigenous cultures of the Americas had also developed their own writing systems , the best known being the Maya script . The Indigenous languages of the Americas had widely varying demographics, from

1680-461: The 2010 census. In Canada, 133,000 people reported speaking an Indigenous language at home in the 2011 census. In Greenland, about 90% of the population speaks Greenlandic , the most widely spoken Eskaleut language . Over a thousand known languages were spoken by various peoples in North and South America prior to their first contact with Europeans. These encounters occurred between the beginning of

1736-478: The 20th century due to Western influence. Several scripts used in the Philippines and Indonesia, such as Hanunoo , are traditionally written with lines moving away from the writer, from bottom to top, but are read horizontally left to right; however, Kulitan , another Philippine script, is written top-to-bottom in columns arranged right-to-left. Ogham is written bottom-to-top and read vertically, commonly on

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1792-489: The Americas by European settlers and administrators, had become the official or national languages of modern nation-states of the Americas. Many Indigenous languages have become critically endangered, but others are vigorous and part of daily life for millions of people. Several Indigenous languages have been given official status in the countries where they occur, such as Guaraní in Paraguay . In other cases official status

1848-599: The Indigenous languages of the Americas are critically endangered, and many are dormant (without native speakers but with a community of heritage-language users) or entirely extinct. The most widely spoken Indigenous languages are Southern Quechua (spoken primarily in southern Peru and Bolivia) and Guarani (centered in Paraguay, where it shares national language status with Spanish), with perhaps six or seven million speakers apiece (including many of European descent in

1904-494: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet in the 20th century. In the first several decades of modern linguistics as a scientific discipline, linguists often characterized writing as merely the technology used to record speech—which was treated as being of paramount importance, for what was seen as the unique potential for its study to further the understanding of human cognition. While certain core terminology

1960-1166: The Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages. The first Commissioner of Indigenous languages in Canada is Ronald E. Ignace . Colombia Colombia delegates local Indigenous language recognition to the department level according to the Colombian Constitution of 1991 . Bolivia Corrientes , Argentina Tacuru , Mato Grosso do Sul , Brazil Mercosur Peru (Official Language) Jujuy , Argentina Comunidad Andina Peru (Official Language) Comunidad Andina Belize Mexico Mexico Belize Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Colombia ( Cauca , Nariño , Putumayo ) La Guajira , Colombia Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto) , Mexico Mexico Honduras ( Gracias

2016-669: The United States, the Navajo language is the most spoken Native American language, with more than 200,000 speakers in the Southwestern United States . The US Marine Corps recruited Navajo men, who were established as code talkers during World War II. In American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America (1997), Lyle Campbell lists several hypotheses for the historical origins of Amerindian languages. Roger Blench (2008) has advocated

2072-635: The act of viewing and interpreting the text as reading . The relationship between writing and language more broadly has been the subject of philosophical analysis as early as Aristotle (384–322 BC). While the use of language is universal across human societies, writing is not—having first emerged much more recently, and only having been independently invented in a handful of locations throughout history. While most spoken languages have not been written, all written languages have been predicated on an existing spoken language. When those with signed languages as their first language read writing associated with

2128-415: The addition of a vowel sign; other possibilities include rotation of the basic sign, or addition of diacritics . While true syllabaries have one symbol per syllable and no systematic visual similarity, the graphic similarity in most abugidas stems from their origins as abjads—with added symbols comprising markings for different vowel added onto a pre-existing base symbol. The largest single group of abugidas

2184-566: The addition of dedicated vowel letters, as with the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet c.  800 BC . Abjad is the word for "alphabet" in Arabic and Malay: the term derives from the traditional order of the Arabic alphabet 's letters 'alif , bā' , jīm , dāl , though the word may have earlier roots in Phoenician or Ugaritic . An abugida

2240-489: The case of Guarani). Only half a dozen others have more than a million speakers; these are Aymara of Bolivia and Nahuatl of Mexico, with almost two million each; the Mayan languages Kekchi , Quiché , and Yucatec of Guatemala and Mexico, with about 1 million apiece; and perhaps one or two additional Quechuan languages in Peru and Ecuador. In the United States, 372,000 people reported speaking an Indigenous language at home in

2296-583: The consonantal sounds of a language. They were the first alphabets to develop historically, with most that have been developed used to write Semitic languages , and originally deriving from the Proto-Sinaitic script . The morphology of Semitic languages is particularly suited to this approach, as the denotation of vowels is generally redundant. Optional markings for vowels may be used for some abjads, but are generally limited to applications like education. Many pure alphabets were derived from abjads through

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2352-600: The corresponding spoken language . Alphabets use graphemes called letters that generally correspond to spoken phonemes , and are typically classified into three categories. In general, pure alphabets use letters to represent both consonant and vowel sounds, while abjads only have letters representing consonants, and abugidas use characters corresponding to consonant–vowel pairs. Syllabaries use graphemes called syllabograms that represent entire syllables or moras . By contrast, logographic (alternatively morphographic ) writing systems use graphemes that represent

2408-523: The earliest true writing, closely followed by the Egyptian hieroglyphs . It is generally agreed that the two systems were invented independently from one another; both evolved from proto-writing systems between 3400 and 3200 BC, with the earliest coherent texts dated c.  2600 BC . Chinese characters emerged independently in the Yellow River valley c.  1200 BC . There

2464-627: The east, it was spoken in Nopaluca , San Salvador el Seco , and Cuapiaxtla . Some families from Ixtenco have migrated to Máximo Serdán in Rafael Lara Grajales , Puebla (Lastra 1998). This Oto-Manguean languages -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Indigenous languages of the Americas The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by

2520-615: The first Bible printed in North America, the Eliot Indian Bible . The Europeans also suppressed use of Indigenous languages, establishing their own languages for official communications, destroying texts in other languages, and insisted that Indigenous people learn European languages in schools. As a result, Indigenous languages suffered from cultural suppression and loss of speakers. By the 18th and 19th centuries, Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch, brought to

2576-473: The hand is to the right side of the pen. The Greek alphabet and its successors settled on a left-to-right pattern, from the top to the bottom of the page. Other scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew , came to be written right-to-left . Scripts that historically incorporate Chinese characters have traditionally been written vertically in columns arranged from right to left, while a horizontal writing direction in rows from left to right became widely adopted only in

2632-430: The lack of information on them. Many proposals have been made to relate some or all of these languages to each other, with varying degrees of success. The most widely reported is Joseph Greenberg 's Amerind hypothesis, which, however, nearly all specialists reject because of severe methodological flaws; spurious data; and a failure to distinguish cognation , contact , and coincidence. According to UNESCO , most of

2688-441: The most common based on what unit of language is represented by each unit of writing. At the highest level, writing systems are either phonographic ( lit.   ' sound writing ' ) when graphemes represent units of sound in a language, or morphographic ( lit.   ' form writing ' ) when graphemes represent units of meaning, such as words or morphemes . The term logographic ( lit.   ' word writing ' )

2744-483: The script. Braille is a non-linear adaptation of the Latin alphabet that completely abandoned the Latin forms. The letters are composed of raised bumps on the writing substrate , which can be leather, stiff paper, plastic or metal. There are also transient non-linear adaptations of the Latin alphabet, including Morse code , the manual alphabets of various sign languages , and semaphore, in which flags or bars are positioned at prescribed angles. However, if "writing"

2800-477: The spoken language in its entirety. Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing systems consisting of ideograms and early mnemonic symbols. The best-known examples include: Writing has been invented independently multiple times in human history. The first writing systems emerged during the Early Bronze Age , with the cuneiform writing system used to write Sumerian generally considered to be

2856-451: The text, the time available for writing, the intended audience, and the largely unconscious features of an individual's handwriting. Orthography ( lit.   ' correct writing ' ) refers to the rules and conventions for writing shared by a community, including the ordering of and relationship between graphemes. Particularly for alphabets , orthography includes the concept of spelling . For example, English orthography includes

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2912-663: The theory of multiple migrations along the Pacific coast of peoples from northeastern Asia, who already spoke diverse languages. These proliferated in the New World. Countries like Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Guyana recognize most Indigenous languages. Bolivia and Venezuela give all Indigenous languages official status. Canada, Argentina, and the U.S. allow provinces and states to decide. Brazil limits recognition to localities. Canada Bill C-91, passed in 2019, supports Indigenous languages through sustainable funding and

2968-444: The top of a page and end at the bottom, with each row read from left to right. Egyptian hieroglyphs were written either left to right or right to left, with the animal and human glyphs turned to face the beginning of the line. The early alphabet could be written in multiple directions: horizontally from side to side, or vertically. Prior to standardization, alphabetic writing could be either left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL). It

3024-501: The units of meaning in a language, such as its words or morphemes . Alphabets typically use fewer than 100 distinct symbols, while syllabaries and logographies may use hundreds or thousands respectively. A writing system also includes any punctuation used to aid readers and encode additional meaning, including that which would be communicated in speech via qualities of rhythm , tone , pitch , accent , inflection , or intonation . According to most contemporary definitions, writing

3080-435: Was most commonly written boustrophedonically : starting in one (horizontal) direction, then turning at the end of the line and reversing direction. The right-to-left direction of the Phoenician alphabet initially stabilized after c.  800 BC . Left-to-right writing has an advantage that, since most people are right-handed , the hand does not interfere with text being written—which might not yet have dried—since

3136-409: Was not linear, its Sumerian ancestors were. Non-linear systems are not composed of lines, no matter what instrument is used to write them. Cuneiform was likely the earliest non-linear writing. Its glyphs were formed by pressing the end of a reed stylus into moist clay, not by tracing lines in the clay with the stylus as had been done previously. The result was a radical transformation of the appearance of

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