There are an amazing number of scripts, alphabets and writing systems used in South Asia and Southeast Asia.
Historical scripts such as Brahmi are no longer used, but gave rise to the majority of the writing systems used today. Tamil inscriptions are among the oldest found in the Indian subcontinent. Kannada, Telugu, Malayali and Sinhala are other scripts used in South India and Sri Lanka.
The Burmese alphabet is very similar in appearance to Sinhala and was originally derived from the Kadamba or Pallava alphabet of South India. In Southeast Asia, the Thai alphabet and Akshara Bali are related to the South Asian family of writing systems.
Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gurmukhi are all writing systems used in Central and North India. There is also the Tibetan script in its many different forms.
Devanagari script is the most used of the contemporary South Asia scripts, being used for Hindi and Nepali as well as being the usual script currently used for the Sanskrit and Pali languages.
In a separate category are the special adaptations of the Perso-Arabic script used for Urdu, Pashto and a number of other languages. I would be remiss if I didn’t remind people that the English language is quite prevalent in South Asia and is written in the Latin/Roman script as it is elsewhere in the world.
Suriyani Malayalam (സുറിയാനി മലയാളം, ܣܘܪܝܢܝ ܡܠܝܠܡ), also known as Karshoni, Syro-Malabarica or Syriac Malayalam, is a dialect of Malayalam written in a variant form of the Syriac Aramaic alphabet used by the Saint Thomas Christians (Nasranis) in the South Indian state of Kerala.
See also SanskritCalligraphy.com
Here is a list of South and Southeast Asian Scripts. If you don’t see what you are looking for please contact me:
Scripts in the Brahmi family:
Akshara Bali
Brahmi
Devanagari (Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Sanskrit)
Gujarati
Gurmukhi
Kannada
Khaiti or Kayathi
Malayali
Modi
Punjabi
Sinhala
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Tibetan
The following scripts are also used in South and Southeast Asia:
Chinese
Jawi
Latin
Perso-Arabic
Urdu
