From a very early age, many children around the world learn the letters of the alphabet. An alphabet is a kind of system used to represent language in written form. In this system each letter represents a different sound in a particular language. Many languages use alphabets, but others use different writing systems. Japanese and Cherokee, for instance, use a syllabary. In this system each syllable is represented rather than each separate sound. The Chinese writing system uses signs or symbols to represent syllables or even whole words.

Early writing systems

The first examples of writing date back more than 5,000 years. Early societies used pictures to represent humans and objects rather than letters and words. Some of these societies wrote on an early type of paper called papyrus, while others carved images into clay tablets.

Eventually, the images were abbreviated into more distinct symbols, and complex writing systems began to evolve. The ancient Sumerians—who lived in what is now southern Iraq—were the first to develop this type of symbol writing. The ancient Egyptians also developed a form of symbol writing, known as hieroglyphics.

A major development in writing systems occurred between 1,500 and 1,000 BC in what is now Syria. The people there simplified the system of writing. They eliminated all signs representing whole words and reduced the syllabary to about 30 symbols. These symbols represented sounds beginning with a consonant and ending in any vowel.

By 1,000 BC, the Phoenicians reduced this syllabary to 22 permanent sounds ending in vowels. The Phoenicians traveled widely throughout parts of the Middle East and northern Africa, and their influence as early traders helped to spread this form of writing to many other societies. In the Middle East, Phoenician writing evolved into Aramaic, the forerunner of the modern Hebrew language. But the Phoenician alphabet would have its greatest influence on the Greeks.

The Greek alphabet and its influences

The ancient Greeks adopted the Phoenician writing system and changed it in ways that would forever alter the idea of alphabets. The word alphabet comes from the first two letters in the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. In the Phoenician syllabary, the 22 consonants could end in any vowel. Therefore the letter d might stand for da, di, du, or other combinations. This combination of consonants and vowels was the same in some offshoots of the Phoenician system, including modern Hebrew.

Rather than combine vowels with consonants, the Greeks created separate characters for vowels and placed them in the alphabet with the consonants. As a result, Greek words contained both types of letters. Because its predecessors were actually syllabaries, the Greek writing system can be called the first true alphabet.

As Greek civilization spread, its language and alphabet influenced surrounding regions. The Etruscans of Italy, the Copts of Egypt, and the Slavonic peoples of eastern Europe all used forms of the Greek alphabet. The Etruscans were the forerunners of the ancient Romans, who spoke Latin and developed the Latin alphabet. As the Roman Empire grew, the Latin alphabet spread throughout the lands controlled by the empire. It became the alphabet of many other languages in addition to Latin. New letters were needed to pronounce words from lands conquered by the empire, while other letters were combined. By the time of the late Roman Empire, in about the 5th century AD, there were 24 letters in the Latin alphabet. After the empire came to an end Latin became the language of the Roman Catholic church. Two more letters, j and w, were added in the Middle Ages by church scholars.

French, Spanish, and other languages developed from Latin during the Middle Ages. During this time, people began to distinguish between capital letters and small letters, which were never used by the Greeks and Romans. As Latin-based languages evolved, many writers added extra marks around letters, called diacritics or accent marks, to stress certain forms of pronunciation.

Other alphabets

Modern Hebrew and Arabic still retain many qualities of the earliest languages. Vowels mostly appear when combined with consonants, and the languages are read from right to left. The Hebrew alphabet—used in Israel and by Jews around the world—is sometimes referred to as “square writing” for the shape of its letters. The Arabic alphabet is used throughout large portions of the Middle East and Africa. After the Latin script, it is the most widely used form of alphabetic writing in the modern world. Both the Hebrew and the Arabic alphabets can be traced back to the Aramaic alphabet, which developed in the Middle East in the 10th century BC.

Experts believe that Aramaic writing also influenced Brahmi script, the earliest known writing system in India, as far back as the 7th century BC. Over time, the different parts of the Indian subcontinent developed a variety of writing systems, including Bengali, Dravidian, Gujarati, and Hindi. The spread of the Buddhist religion throughout Southeast Asia brought these Indian-based languages to numerous other countries and island groups. As in the Phoenician alphabet and many of its offshoots, consonants in these Indian languages are never written by themselves—they are always combined with vowels.

The Cyrillic alphabet was created in the 9th or 10th century AD for Slavic-speaking peoples of the Eastern Orthodox faith. It was named for Saint Cyril, a Greek missionary to the slavic people of eastern Europe in the 9th century. Cyrillic was based on the Greek and Latin alphabets. It became the alphabet used by Bulgarians, Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians, and several other groups. It is still used today in these regions.