Babel · Writing Systems
The Atlas of Writing
Every language wears a script — and a handful of scripts dress almost the whole world. Here each writing system is a specimen in its own hand: the tree they nearly all grew from, the five ways humans turn speech into marks, and the territories they hold.
Almost every script grew from one root
Around 1750 BCE, Semitic miners in the Sinai borrowed a few Egyptian pictures to spell their own words. From that Proto-Sinaitic seed came Phoenician, then Greek and Aramaic — and from those two roads, the Latin you are reading, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and the whole Brahmic arc of India and Southeast Asia. Only a few systems — Han, Hangul, Cherokee — were invented apart.
Five ways to turn speech into marks
Which script a language uses is mostly an accident of history. How a script encodes sound is a real design choice — and a far richer lens. Tap a type to light up the wall below.
The wall of the world's scripts
Real Wiktionary words, each rendered in its native letters. This is the diversity the all-Latin map hides.
Where the scripts hold ground
Every placeable language as a dot, coloured by the script its Wiktionary words appear in. Latin is a quiet grey base on purpose — flip the switch to drop it entirely and watch the real provinces emerge: the Cyrillic bloc, the Arabic crescent, the Brahmic arc, the CJK east, and the lonely single-language scripts.