Writing systems of Southeast Asia

Here follows a list of known writing systems used in Southeast Asia. Where different groups use the same script in different ways, we use the deliberately broad term “orthography”. This indicates a) that the written language requires extra letters (or omits some of the usual letters); and/or b) that the language is written using sequences of characters that don’t occur in other languages; and/or c) that some letters have different structures or represent different sounds; and/or d) that the letters are generally expected to be written a different style (e.g some of the minority languages of Burma prefer the letters to have dotted terminals).

We include the Lik scripts used by Tai groups outside Southeast Asia for completeness, and consider them as a continuum of styles of the same alphabet.

For the Baybayin script, we found the situation is in flux as different languages are starting to revitalise slightly diverging forms of the script, and we list those as different orthographies for the time being.

Latin-based orthographies are excluded for the time being.

This is a work in progress. Please submit issues to the GitHub source repository if you find errors or omissions.