5:00 For anyone wondering, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Izhorian, and Veps were the languages written in Latin that did not get Cyrillized (there were attempts to do so but they did not succeed).
Izhorian has no written language (they tried in the 1930's) , the first 3 kept this as a resistance to their Soviet occupiers, and Veps was too small to worry about . @@--julian_
@@HeroManNick132 I was curious because the ussr was very authoritarian, so thought they would have pushed a bigger effort to change them like they did in central Asia. eg Uzbekistan is Muslim but they commonly use Cyrillic and are changing to Latin script, so religion isn't everything clearly
Wow, I knew India had a huge variety of spoken languages but I had no clue how many unique writing systems were present for all of them. Considering how common it seems for writing systems to be generalized to new languages (often ones that they don't even represent all that well), there must be some fascinating history behind this diveristy in writing systems.
Yes there is. In short, all of them trace back to Bramhi script. Old Bramhi was carved in stone, and is very angular. However, as the script spread, it was written on different types of paper. In the north, the paper was closer to modern papers, and so northern scripts like Devanagari, Bengali and Modi use a script which is more suitable for speed writing. Meanwhile, South Indian scripts are more curved so as to avoid tearing the coconut leaf based paper. Also every kingdom worth their salt would invent a new script which were identical to Devanagari but with different symbols for each characters. Sometime around 500 AD, SEA was heavily Indianized, and so Thai, Khmer, Malay, Javanese and Balinese are also derived from this
@@drummerofaweyeah. Many of the languages and scripts of India have quite a surprising and fascinating history. An example is Gujarati script, used in the Western Trading/Business state of Gujarat. As you must have observed, the Devanagari script used for Hindi/Sanskrit has that line on top of words. Ancient gujarati businessmen thought drawing the line was time consuming while writing all the accounts and balances. So, they casually removed that line and Gujarati script is almost Devanagari script minus the line . Another example is of the Businessmen of Sindh (a province in modern-day Pakistan). The hindus used Devanagari and the Muslims used perso-arabic script there, but somehow the Traders wanted to keep their accounts and messages safe from both these people (in cases of Hindu-Muslim riots). So they invented their own script called Khudabadi script. Such Stories from India never fail to amaze!😂
From my experience, Gujarati writing system is very similar to the point where if you know Devanagari you can guess what most of the letters are in Gujarati.
It is most reasonable based on the number of people. By number of countries: If a country, every village declares independence, does its writing system become more widespread? By number of languages: If a language splits and counts all dialects and sub-dialects as languages, does the writing system become more widespread? The classification of countries and languages is subjective, not objective. Only the number of people is objective.
@@inkuaxjieng your logic is flawed. Based on your logic does chinese or hindu(mooooo xD) writing system seems more widespread to you? Because the number of people using the system is quite a lot, but that is not the case because both of those writing systems are contained on a rather small area (relatively speaking). Whereas, Arabic seems more widespread, not beacuse more people use the writing system but rather the area it's spread across is undoubtedly vast, spanning from Moroco in northwest Africa all the way down to Afghanistan in Central Asia and way beyond. Now that is vast. Your analogy of a country splitting into many villages and each of those villages declaring their independence is not remotely close to making the writing system more wisespread, for the ultimate outcome is still bounded by geographical boundaries, meaning the area does not increase just beacuse there are more soverign states, thus the outreach of the system will remain unaffected. Now if you put many people into that area, which spans a very small territory, does the writing system become more widespread becuse alot of people use it? Clearly not. Your claim that "the number of people is obective" is in itself subjective. Have a great day dear youtube user.
@@testprime-ye5od Yes. More people use it. It is more widespread. Besides, if we're counting by geographic area, there are plenty of Hindi and Chinese writers all over the world.
Not to be an annoying flag nerd, but at 2:24 you used the pre-2017 flag of Mauritania, which now has horiztonal red stripes at the top and bottom. Actually fun fact about the pre-2017 flag was it, along with Jamaica, were the only two country flags left which didn't use red, white, or blue in its colour scheme. Now Jamaica is the only one.
@@LingoLizard Well I do kinda like the new one lol, old one felt a bit bare. Although if we're representing countries in a factual vid like this shouldn't we use the current flag, regardless of how good it looks or not?
@hexyellow9873 And the pre-2021 flag, white with أَشْهَدُ أَنْ لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا ٱللَّٰهُ وَأَشْهَدُ أَنَّ مُحَمَّدًا رَسُولُ ٱللَّٰهِ going across it
00:49 Boro, also known as Bodo, is my mothertongue. Its written in Devanagari script and belongs to Tibeto-Burman branch of Sino-Tibetan language family. It's Spoken in Northeastern part of India, the Indian state of West Bengal and Nepal.
One slight caveat for the third point: You only counted the population *whose native language* used that script. In reality, most people in the world are bilingual. In India, even though only about 400 Million people speak Hindi as a first language, most of the country's population learns devanagari in school. Mostly because Hindi as a subject is compulsary in most schools for at least 5 years, and also a few other reasons (for example, sanskrit is the liturgical language for Hinduism, which about 80% of the country practices, and is the language of most of the scriptures, hymns and chants. I have seen some people write sanskrit hymns in the Kannada or malayalam scripts, but usually devanagari is most common, even among those who don't use it natively). As such, the actual number of people who understand and use the script is closer to a billion, probably more. Also, you missed out on a dark horse for just population. For while it doesn't even come close to these Big 4 in terms of number of languages or countries, Bengali might just have usurped the number 4 slot from Cyrillic in terms of number of users. While it was pegged just short, at 272 million, this was in 2017 and the regions where Bengali is common have a far higher fertility rate than those where cyrillic is. Bengali might have just overtaken cyrillic, or might do so any day now. Imagine that! You will wake up any day now, thinking it's a regular day, but no! It is the day that the Bengali script has one more user than the Cyrillic script, a historic event that would rattle the foundations of our universe to their core.
Bengali-Assamese script has already surpassed the Cyrilllic script atleast a year ago. Currently there are 262 million Bengalis and 15 million Assamese who use this script which means it amounts to 277 million.
Also can you imagine Bengali being the 6th most spoken language even though their landmass is so small compared to giants like Chinese or Spanish. Another fun fact is that they are the 3rd most biggest ethnicity in the world but are divided.
If you do that, then you should also count the number of muslim who recite the Quran. While most of them can't understand what's it's actually mean, they still can read and write it.
Meanwhile Singapore is proud that its the only country to recognize Tamil as an official language (as many Indians there are traditionally descendants of migrants from India's southeastern Tamil Nadu state, probably as it's the nearest state to Singapore, but more recent migration probably comes from many other Indian states too)
0:42 - measure 1: number of countries used/offficial in 2:39 - measure 2: number of languages using each script 7:10 - measure 3: number of people using the script
@@cerebrummaximus3762 cyhirilic is a monks freak alphabet designated for second class population in bizantine empire a knee made construct ,go ahead with ego nationalistic absurdity Serbian ,Croatian example use Latin alphabet very easy . Ukraine considered the Latin but postponed because of costs .
@@longjohnny009 If you are unaware of history, aim not to speak. If you'd enjoy, I'd dissect your poorly written comment, but every flaw you have typed can be corrected by yourself via a quick Google.
@@HeroManNick132Uzbekistan have been transitioning to Latin for more than 30 years now, and they still miss every deadline including latest in 2023, it's not like Kazakh script will suddenly become Latin-based by 2025.
Most of Muslims, generally able to atleast recognize, let alone read The Arabic Script since We read Quran in Arabic. But The Arabic Script in Quran use somekind of A "Reading Sign" called Harakat
Harakat aren't exclusive to the Quran, we simply rarely need them, children's books, for example almost always have them, we even use them in daily life and casual conversations if a more difficult word or a word that has multiple meanings comes up
Another interesting metric would be the amount of printed material or content published online. I think Chinese would be the winner there, but it's just a conjecture.
@@thecomment9489 Russian language actually gave Chinese "a run on its money" when it came to number of websites, and internet activity. Perhaps this has since flipped.
@@ilyakasnacheev I've seen those statistics, but they seem highly questionable. It's possible that in the methodology for gathering that data they ignored the chinese internet entirely.
You forgot to mention that Chinese is also used in Vietnamese in a form of Chu Nom and it was academically standarized recently. It's still used in parts of China by the Gin community and some people in Vietnam. Chunom is also used by Tai ethnic groups of Vietnam and its version is related to Zhuang's sawndip.
There is one metric you totally missed, although I don't know if it is actually mesurable, and that is how many actual text are created in each script on avarage in a given period of time (Eg daily, yearly etc.)
Published works? The numbers are Latin Alphabet Chinese Characters Arabic script Devanagari Cyrillic script If you mean just online usage like social media etc considering access to internet in each of the areas It'd be Latin Alphabet Chinese Characters Devanagari Arabic Script Cyrillic script
1:30 As a Serbo-Croatian native speaker, this was spot on. Just something to note: Serbian nationalists tend to use Cyrillic a lot, as it's their "national script", and some Croats may not be able to read Cyrillic at all because it's not taught there anymore (though it wouldn't be very hard to learn, as they can be written 1:1)
Serbo Croatian Cyrillic is pretty cool. Then again, Cyrillic is just cool in most of the Slavic languages that use it. I speak some Russian and it’s so nifty how it sort of fits together like a puzzle. It really just seems to get Slavic languages (perhaps because it was made for them). Representing palatalized consonants is usually so ugly in the Latin script (serbo Croatian does a better job than some other languages in my opinion). I just really hate seeing an apostrophe used for that purpose.
Don't make Cyrillic a "nationalist" thing, its just the official script of Serbian, its the most commonly used script in Serbia for writing on paper and is thought in school first and foremost (tho latin comes soon after but it is payed way less attention as I have completely forgotten cursive latin even tho i did learn it)
@@valeradelasantos7893 cyhirilic is a monks freak alphabet designated for second class population in bizantine empire a knee made construct ,go ahead with ego nationalistic absurdity Serbian ,Croatian example use Latin alphabet very easy . Ukraine considered the Latin but postponed because of costs .
@@happyelephant5384 I think it's very easy, and it obviously will be Chinese characters, than Cyrillic. Much rarer I could see Arabic/Korean, and even rarer everything else.
@@KnightOfEternity13 I meant, in practical sense: how do you objectively calculate consumed content? Get data from every computer, phone? How to compare it? What is "bigger" tik-tok video or post in Facebook? Is all content equal? Is technical literature as important as massive amount of twitter and Facebook posts? And many other questions . This would be highly subjective measure, imho.
@@happyelephant5384 I agree that it can be hard to make a exact calculation, but I think you don't doubt that USA produce more content than, for example, Montenegro. There're different ways to calculate it, from website share to amount of published books and scientific papers in a given country. Usually you can look at country GDP for a very rough estimate
@@KnightOfEternity13 obviously, USA vs Montenegro is easy. But Spanish vs English vs Chinese vs Arabic probably isn't thaaaat easy. Or Russian vs Sanskrit vs French.
While mentioning India with many different writing systems I think that Indonesia should not be overlooked. Many different ethnic groups used their own writing system (e,g, Java and Bali) or used Arabic for their local language (Aceh and Minangkabau (West Sumatra)). But Bahasa Indonesia with its use of the Latin alphabet is marginalising all other systems at a somewhat alarming rate.
How does languages in indonesia work? I'm curious. Is it used in government offices and schools. Do they produce media (movies and such) in their languages. Or is used just for speaking with themselves
@@AJYT690 it really depends on the ethnicity and the person’s personal background. The ethnicities with a smaller population often don’t speak their language in daily conversation, only adding certain words to their dialect of Indonesian. But people who live in generally homogenous areas, so either rural or a city in Java would speak their language daily. Also, for example, I’m of mixed Sumatran ancestry so my parents speak to each other in Indonesian and I was raised speaking Indonesian. And another thing would be that the Chinese language is dying amongst the Chindo population. Traditionally Chinese people in Indonesia were split between Peranakan (Chinese whose culture and traditions have syncretised with indigenous cultures) and Totok (Chinese people whose culture and lifestyle are similar to Mainlanders). In Indonesia the Chinese community is becoming more Peranakan whilst in Malaysia and Singapore they are becoming more Totok. This is because Jakarta’s Chinese population is historically Peranakan, and some Chinese words (gue = I, lu = you) have become standard Indonesian vocabulary.
I often hear this argument about "sounds that doesn't exist in the Latin script". No sounds exists in the Latin script. But languages apply modifications, such as English using "sh" and "ch" or Polish using "ś", "ń" and "ż". A lot of languages have made adjustments to make the Latin script fit much nicer into the language, and if other languages are going to do it, they should make adjustments too.
@@Liggliluff I ment that the base latin script doesnt represent the sounds, I just wanted to say something that I know about. Well what we do is unoffical, but we do also sometimes use it in movie or show titles under arabic text, The diffrance is that we use numbers Here is a list 2 = glottel stop 3 = the ع sound '3 = the غ sound 7 = the ح sound Kh = خ
@@justaduck1664 Base Latin script I assume you mean A-Z, but letters don't have sounds. It's depending on the orthography. Some have Z represent /z/, some have it represent /ts/, and you could just as well have it represent ح for its shape.
It is still impressive that the Latin alphabet is used in some way in almost all countries - even where this script is not one of the official languages. There are many reasons for this: the fact that English is a compulsory subject in schools almost everywhere, globalization, US market dominance or in countries like China, where they learn the Latin letters before their own characters so that they know how to pronounce them. This system is called "Pinyin".
While Kashmiri Hindus do sometimes use Devanagari for Kashmiri, overwhelming majority of Kashmiris can’t even read Devanagari. Neither is Devanagari official writing system for Kashmiri. Kashmiri is written in a modified version of Perso-Arabic script and that is what is official. And that is what is taught in schools.
Also, wouldn't it be beautiful, if problematic, that Bosnian were still written in Arabic script, so you would have the three for Serbocroatian: Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic? But alas the world is not so perfect.
There are different versions of Arabic writing: Ajami for West African languages, Aljamiado/Morisco for European Spanish, and other versions for Indian and Southeast Asian languages, as well as one for Chinese.
@@lilacfields ya lo sé, vivo aquí. De lo que no tenía ni idea era de la peña escribiendo español con ese sistema de escritura. Quiero decir, no sé si se hace actualmente o si es algo del Al-Andalus
2:42 and then there exists someone who designed 42 conlangs in powerpoint under which two cyrillic ones which you don't _have_ to count since they are not official lol
He did mentioned Mongolia. He was saying that they use Cyrillic, but are currently undergoing a process of transitioning to using a different script (the indigenous Mongol script, the one written top to bottom)
I made a little table, in which I assigned points to writting systems based both on users and number of laguages. (ignoring countries used as I considered not important). I took your order giving 4 point to first and one to last. And I got Cyrilic as a looser, but the other three just came tied, at 5 points each. Damn. So normalizated to 100 based on the one that scored the most for the two categories and dividing each other in that value, and for 10 on the country category (as i deemed least important). So, the second most used writting system came up for the Arabic one, followed by a close tie (Not again!!) for Chinese and Devanagari. Cyrilic again at last. Just for curiosity, Cyrilic is used in a variety of programming languages, while Chinese, Arabic and Devanagari are extremely rarely used, or used just by educational languages. This bring me the question, What ammount of books are printed in each system?, which at the end is the objetive of a writting system.
AS A CHINESE, I JUST KNOW ABOUT 500 DIFFERENT CHINESE CHARACTERS BUT THIS ENOUGH FOR DAILY LIFE. THIS 500 DIFFERENT CHINESE CHARACTERS ARE THE BASIC/COMMON WORDS OF CHINESE LANGUAGE. EACH ONE IS A SINGLE/ELEMENT WORD. 90% OF VOCABULARY OF CHINESE LANGUAGE ARE COMPOUND WORDS WHICH MORE THAN 2 CHINESE CHARACTERS COMBINING TOGETHER LOGICALLY, SUCH AS 飛機=FLYING MACHINE=AEROPLANE 電視=ELECTRONIC VIEW=TELEVISION 電腦=ELECTRONIC BRAIN=COMPUTER JUST LIKE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN WRITING, CHINESE CHARACTERS ARE CAME FROM SIMPLE PICTURE. THE CHINESE DO NOT USE ALPHABET.
❤ I use the first three scripts-latin,as I had English medium education; devnagari,as I was educated in Lucknow; Arabic, because I speak Urdu since I grew up in Lucknow, on a daily basis ❤
Let’s make it a point system. 4 points for 1st place and 1 point for last. Devanagari 1/2/2=5 Cyrillic 3/4/1=8 Chinese 2/1/4=7 Arabic 4/3/3=10 Winner Arabic.
You've left out an important contender. Emoji. It is a writing system used by nearly every literate person with a cell phone, regardless of language. (So really, it's not a contender for 2nd place at all. It's number one!)
For Chinese, you entirely miscounted. You counted the major families, but each of those have hundreds of related languages under each. China has hundreds of languages, not all of them even Sinitic, using Hanzi. It should be in first place in individual language count.
But then again, how many of these Sinitic languages actually have a standardized writing system? And how many speakers just use the language in speaking, but write in Mandarin?
@@maxim_ml A few of the languages, primarily non-Sinitic, have their own writing systems including logogrqphies, syllabaries, and alphabets. The rest, mostly Sinitix but also non-Sinitic, use Hanzi.
2:35 wait a moment, CHINA OUT OF ALL PLACES? Sure, there is a sizable community of people who may use arabic (aka chinese muslims) but i never expected the script to have actual official status there, but now: today i learned.
@@Rolando_Cueva It's read as Bahut, Only some stupid & unaware people say Bahot it's their accent problem but In my area we read it Only Bahut not Bahot like how illiterate LoL
@@Indian_Rajput भगवान जाने तुम्हें ये तीन लाईक मिले। खड़ीबोली सुनो, बहुत को बोहोत जैसा ही बोलेंगे। भाषाएँ बदलती हैं, मेरे दोस्त, कुछ नहीं कर सकते - थोड़ी इज़्ज़त दिखाने के सिनाय। राजपुत तो मैं भी हूँ, और मैं कह सकता हूँ कि हालाँकि देवनागारी मुझे बहुत पसंद है और कई सारी अच्छाइयाँ हैं, ख़राबियाँ देखे बिना इन अच्छाइयों की क़ीमत भी कम हो जाती है। जो है, उसकी तारीफ़ करो! देवनागरी बढ़िया है पर कामिल नहीं।
@@yanwato9050 Abe Murkh Khadi boli is a dialect Boli means Dialect, Dialect is different from language even Bhojpuri is considered dialect even Crores of people know Bhojpuri. There are many dialects Awadhi, Marwari, Haryanvi, Rajasthani etc they didn't recognise as language they comes under banner of हिंदी
@@HeroManNick132 the question was whether Moldovan was still written in cyrillic or not, you may rarely find it in Moldova proper, whilst it is very common in Transnistria. That’s all that I was saying.
@@Dwarfplayerseems anywhere under the (in)direct kremlin control, any languages besides russian show off For instance, Ukrainian is still supposed to count as one of the official languages in the occupied Crimea, yet people are being literally sued for using it publically (except for when one is sanctioned to). Likewise, never met anyone from Transnistria speak Romanian (or “Moldovan”) nor Ukrainian, even among people with the respective passport, russian only. This may differ from someone else’s experience though
@@nonameuserua Transnistria is a kgb mafia separatist unit 70% there are not Russian but they are imposed ,forced to speaking occupant language . they closed Romanian ,Ukrainian Bulgarian etc schools there for ru sification . Now many normal Russians there started to send children's in Chisinau to learn Romanian because they don't have future in Transnistria crime regime
Imo hangul uses Chinese characters way too rarely for it to count. Japanese also uses primarily its own characters and will often put the pronunciation of a Kanji in japanese characters above said Kanji
Yes, Japanese has made some changes to the kanji characters which differ from Chinese. But the majority of Japanese kanji is still understandable for people who are literate in Chinese, and vice versa (not talking about pronunciation here). In the same way, every language that uses Cyrillic has its own set of special characters. Not even the Slavic languages agree on one unified alphabet. And when you get to the various languages of central Asia, it gets wild. Also, languages like Persian and Urdu have their own variations of the Arabic script. Still they are clearly recognizable as Arabic script.
Japanese primarily uses kanji with kana almost entirely used for grammatical markers, some government work, and children. Kana is about as used in Japan as hanja is in Korea, which you said is too rarely used to count.
@@deathpigeon2No it isn't "as rarely used as hanja in korea" lol A given text may have more kana than kanji and you'll find many phrases written entirely in kana. How is that like hanja at all. Kana and Kanji are both used very often. And Kana isn't just used for those things... Are you stupid?
@@deathpigeon2 Excuse me? That's not accurate. Both Kanji and Hiragana take up a good amount of most sentences together. Many words (especially adverbs and onomatopoeias) are only written with hiragana, all verbs have their grammatical aspect, tense, and mood marked by hiragana, and nouns usually have a "particle" marking case after them that's written in hiragana. Now, Katakana is more situational, that is true. Its mostly used for foreign loan words, which can be a significant amount of a sentence when talking about things like technology, but they are rarer. You also might be getting it confused for furigana? Furigana are small hiragana sometimes placed above a kanji to tell pronunciation. Theyre really only used for people learning to write or weird, irregular kanji readings.
Counting by numbers of users and by number of countries of use are definitely the least interesting ways to think about this. It's the creation of scripts for languages and their adaptation to other languages that makes writing scripts complex and fascinating.
One thing to note is most of the 1.9 billion Muslims around the world can read Arabic via the Quran, even if they can’t speak a language that uses the script. So Arabic would actually top the chart all together
alr, so being chinese, i can tell with full confidence, china has at least more than 100 languages in the hanzi script. Ppl just call them dialicts cuz unity and all
Tbh Turkic languages could revert to Arabic-based script (like the Uyghurs and Azerbaijanis in İran). As many countries using Latin script have modified and created new letters to represent sounds in their languages, the Turkic countries could do the same with Arabic script.
They could but why should they? Latin has clearly more benefits in this time, also Arabic script is flawed anyway, because it misses vowels, and also unreadable on the web, because it's basically cursive.
Yeah, Uyghur alphabet doesn't have any letters that represent vowels, and Chinese is unreadable on the web too because they're basically logograms. Correct: Unreadable for europeans and americans.
@@eleftheriaethanatos The only thing that they are used to it and lazy to change, so they prefer to struggle with it. But why change the better thing for the worse, if you already use the superior and more universal script?
@@KnightOfEternity13 Arguably logograms are better. Why? Becuase of information density. You don't write ten thousand, nine hundred and thirty-two in full, you write 19132. And your "and"->&, percent->"%. Don't forget all the currency signs, math symbols, etc. We already use logograms, not just the alphabetical script because it is a nice shorthand, essentially. Hell, if you look at this further, logograms can be used in all languages. Whether "1" is read as 'one', 'yi', 'uno' in those languages, it doesn't matter, because from this symbol, you can tell that it is indeed the concept of "one", because these are a universal logograms
Another measure is families of writing systems. Greek, Roman and Cyrillic are in the same family; so are Arabic and Hebrew; Chinese and Japanese; and there are quite a few related to Devanagari...
It may be a fine point but I would not include Chinese characters since each character is a word unto itself. Also I've always said Roman script instead of Latin.
Regarding Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia & Herzegovina; Bosnia and Herz predominantly uses the Latin script in the federation of Bosnia, with a majority cyrillic in Republika Srpska (The two places being of similar size and population), Montenegro has the Latin script in the lead, but Serbia uses cyrillic script the most (All three in terms of use in writing text.) Source: I am Serbian.
2:24, the flag for Mauritania is wrong, the flag includes 2 red stripes at the top and bottom, and it was updated from the old flag (the one used in the video) to the new flag in 2017, this video was uploaded in 2023, so he got the flag wrong. this nerdy ahh comment was written by a vexiollogist.
the number of users is the most important, languages don't care about borders, borders can change... Imagine an area with hundreds of countries speaking the same language, and one big country with hundred of diffferent languages...
nakakatuwa pa nga tignan 'yung itsura ng Sirilikong Alpabeto. minsan naiisip ko "ano kaya kung ito gamit naming paraan ng pagsulat" haha pero ito itsura kung 'yun man Ганито сигуро перо 'ди ако сигурадо кугн тама пагкакагамит ко хаха.
Of the three, I would agree it's the most important. However, a good case has been made in these comments for taking into account the volume of text produced.
it's quite annoying to differentiate between dialects and languages. in my chinese hometown for example, i am unable to understand the people from the southern or northwestern parts of the same city, despite being all within the "mandarin" language, "guanzhong" dialect, "xi'an" subdialect. the phenomenon is even more profound in southern china. while pretty much every portuguese speaker i know can understand spanish (latin america) just fine, and vice versa...
All Slavs can understand each other. Meanwhile in the Chinese world, not only are dialects of Mandarin not intelligible but even completely different familles like Cantonese or Hokkien are counted as "dialects".
Writing system is about writing, not about speaking, thus there is no reason to count by languages. But I don't know is there reason to count by users because there could be more chinese speaking countries, where they'd use chinise character. But, I rather reckon that it makes sense to count by number of countires because legislation is written in their language with their writing system.
It's not Arabic script but modified Arabic scripts with extra letters. You should use the term scripts derived from Brahmi characters. Then it will be second.
That would be more accurate for the "Chinese characters" as well, as while it's not _really_ wrong, each of the countries that use it have some characters that differ from the others or write the same characters slightly differently. They're all recognizably from the same source, but have since diverged from each other.
That applies to every major script: most countries using the Latin script add their own characters, Cyryllic also has variations (e.g. Ukrainian has letters that Russian doesn't use and vice versa), the Japanese kanji characters are not exactly the same as the ones used in China (and even China doesn't use exactly the same charavters everywhere) and so on.
@@MaoRatto even if by 'accent marks' you meant all diacritics, including stuff like ź, ž, ř or ö - there's plenty of languages that add brand new letters to Latin alphabet, like ł, ø, œ, ð, ɘ and so on.
No, cuz countries in europe were never colonized and a lot were never colonial powers. Other than that, how else do you think writing systems travel, countries dont just decide to switch
3:54 You are missing languages like Okinawan, annnd I wouldn't count dialect groups as one language due to their limited intelligibility or unintelligibility, therefore I would count things like Wenzhounese and Shanghainese separate languages. If you go by Japanese... there's also the thing with what's a dialect vs what's a language with Hachijou as an example being classified as its own language while there are possibly dialects of similar unintelligibility. 4:16 there they are! The Ryukyuan languages... 4:22 I'd count around 300 languages considering the mutual intelligibility of the spoken languages... though written, the dialect groups of Chinese can be considered to have one written language for many languages each.
If you take into account People of countries who can write and read the alphabet, arabic alphabet took the second place. 51 countries and sizable percentage of 1.8 billion muslim.
You missed Romanian/Moldovan in languages that use Cyrilic. In Transnistria (de iure part of Moldova, but in reality they are independent from it, with the support of Russia) is Moldovan still officially written in Cyrilic (as was the case in all of Moldova until USSR dissolution and until 1860 in Romania. (Because Moldova has its own army, Moldovan is a language and not just a dialect of Romanian.)
cyhirilic is a monks freak alphabet designated for second class population in bizantine empire a knee made construct ,go ahead with ego nationalistic absurdity Serbian ,Croatian example use Latin alphabet very easy . Ukraine considered the Latin but postponed because of costs .
Another point is that scripts like Gujarati and Gurmukhi are basically devnagri with some modifications. If you count those, you will find that number to be much higher. Also, as others have mentioned, this only counts native speakers. And most people who speak Gujarati or Indian Punjabi(Gurmukhi script users) can also speak in Hindi and use Devanagari. So Devanagari is likely #3 in this after Latin and Han.
As someone who can read and write Hindi and Urdu scripts ,I can read Gujarati but not Punjabi. Gujarati is close to the Hindi script IMHO.@@banimalhalder723
5:00
For anyone wondering, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Izhorian, and Veps were the languages written in Latin that did not get Cyrillized (there were attempts to do so but they did not succeed).
why did it failed?
Izhorian has no written language (they tried in the 1930's) , the first 3 kept this as a resistance to their Soviet occupiers, and Veps was too small to worry about . @@--julian_
@@HeroManNick132 I was curious because the ussr was very authoritarian, so thought they would have pushed a bigger effort to change them like they did in central Asia. eg Uzbekistan is Muslim but they commonly use Cyrillic and are changing to Latin script,
so religion isn't everything clearly
@cuddles1767 ill take this answer lmao
@@HeroManNick132 Well , Bangladesh uses its own writing system .
Wow, I knew India had a huge variety of spoken languages but I had no clue how many unique writing systems were present for all of them. Considering how common it seems for writing systems to be generalized to new languages (often ones that they don't even represent all that well), there must be some fascinating history behind this diveristy in writing systems.
Yes there is. In short, all of them trace back to Bramhi script. Old Bramhi was carved in stone, and is very angular. However, as the script spread, it was written on different types of paper. In the north, the paper was closer to modern papers, and so northern scripts like Devanagari, Bengali and Modi use a script which is more suitable for speed writing. Meanwhile, South Indian scripts are more curved so as to avoid tearing the coconut leaf based paper. Also every kingdom worth their salt would invent a new script which were identical to Devanagari but with different symbols for each characters. Sometime around 500 AD, SEA was heavily Indianized, and so Thai, Khmer, Malay, Javanese and Balinese are also derived from this
@@mvalthegamer2450 wow that's quite the history! Thanks for taking the time to respond
@@mvalthegamer2450Malay doesn't have its own script, it used Kawi which is primarily used to write old Javanese. Also it's BRAHMI
@@drummerofaweyeah. Many of the languages and scripts of India have quite a surprising and fascinating history.
An example is Gujarati script, used in the Western Trading/Business state of Gujarat. As you must have observed, the Devanagari script used for Hindi/Sanskrit has that line on top of words. Ancient gujarati businessmen thought drawing the line was time consuming while writing all the accounts and balances. So, they casually removed that line and Gujarati script is almost Devanagari script minus the line .
Another example is of the Businessmen of Sindh (a province in modern-day Pakistan). The hindus used Devanagari and the Muslims used perso-arabic script there, but somehow the Traders wanted to keep their accounts and messages safe from both these people (in cases of Hindu-Muslim riots). So they invented their own script called Khudabadi script. Such Stories from India never fail to amaze!😂
From my experience, Gujarati writing system is very similar to the point where if you know Devanagari you can guess what most of the letters are in Gujarati.
If you base it on the averages of the three results it's
Arabic 2nd
Chinese & Devanagari 3rd (this would need further deep dive)
Cyrillic 4th
It is most reasonable based on the number of people.
By number of countries: If a country, every village declares independence, does its writing system become more widespread?
By number of languages: If a language splits and counts all dialects and sub-dialects as languages, does the writing system become more widespread?
The classification of countries and languages is subjective, not objective. Only the number of people is objective.
@@inkuaxjieng your logic is flawed. Based on your logic does chinese or hindu(mooooo xD) writing system seems more widespread to you? Because the number of people using the system is quite a lot, but that is not the case because both of those writing systems are contained on a rather small area (relatively speaking).
Whereas, Arabic seems more widespread, not beacuse more people use the writing system but rather the area it's spread across is undoubtedly vast, spanning from Moroco in northwest Africa all the way down to Afghanistan in Central Asia and way beyond. Now that is vast.
Your analogy of a country splitting into many villages and each of those villages declaring their independence is not remotely close to making the writing system more wisespread, for the ultimate outcome is still bounded by geographical boundaries, meaning the area does not increase just beacuse there are more soverign states, thus the outreach of the system will remain unaffected. Now if you put many people into that area, which spans a very small territory, does the writing system become more widespread becuse alot of people use it? Clearly not. Your claim that "the number of people is obective" is in itself subjective.
Have a great day dear youtube user.
Cyrillic would actually be number five, as Chinese and Bramhi vie for third place. Traditional and Simplified are both Chinese for this purpose.
@@testprime-ye5od因为人会倾向于聚集在自然环境好的地方。西亚，中东，北非都有很多人烟稀少的地方，靠面积来判断语言的广泛程度也是有一定不合理性的。比如非要说的话，欧洲和美洲都在用拉丁字母，难道我们可以把整个大西洋都算在面积里吗？
@@testprime-ye5od Yes. More people use it. It is more widespread.
Besides, if we're counting by geographic area, there are plenty of Hindi and Chinese writers all over the world.
Not to be an annoying flag nerd, but at 2:24 you used the pre-2017 flag of Mauritania, which now has horiztonal red stripes at the top and bottom.
Actually fun fact about the pre-2017 flag was it, along with Jamaica, were the only two country flags left which didn't use red, white, or blue in its colour scheme. Now Jamaica is the only one.
I know, I used the old flag because the red at the bottom of the new one sucks
@@LingoLizard Well I do kinda like the new one lol, old one felt a bit bare. Although if we're representing countries in a factual vid like this shouldn't we use the current flag, regardless of how good it looks or not?
@hexyellow9873 And the pre-2021 flag, white with أَشْهَدُ أَنْ لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا ٱللَّٰهُ وَأَشْهَدُ أَنَّ مُحَمَّدًا رَسُولُ ٱللَّٰهِ going across it
@hexyellow9873 It is? I never heard that
@hexyellow9873 Thanks for explaining
00:49 Boro, also known as Bodo, is my mothertongue. Its written in Devanagari script and belongs to Tibeto-Burman branch of Sino-Tibetan language family. It's Spoken in Northeastern part of India, the Indian state of West Bengal and Nepal.
Oh!! fellow Boro speaker here.
One slight caveat for the third point: You only counted the population *whose native language* used that script. In reality, most people in the world are bilingual. In India, even though only about 400 Million people speak Hindi as a first language, most of the country's population learns devanagari in school. Mostly because Hindi as a subject is compulsary in most schools for at least 5 years, and also a few other reasons (for example, sanskrit is the liturgical language for Hinduism, which about 80% of the country practices, and is the language of most of the scriptures, hymns and chants. I have seen some people write sanskrit hymns in the Kannada or malayalam scripts, but usually devanagari is most common, even among those who don't use it natively). As such, the actual number of people who understand and use the script is closer to a billion, probably more.
Also, you missed out on a dark horse for just population. For while it doesn't even come close to these Big 4 in terms of number of languages or countries, Bengali might just have usurped the number 4 slot from Cyrillic in terms of number of users. While it was pegged just short, at 272 million, this was in 2017 and the regions where Bengali is common have a far higher fertility rate than those where cyrillic is. Bengali might have just overtaken cyrillic, or might do so any day now. Imagine that! You will wake up any day now, thinking it's a regular day, but no! It is the day that the Bengali script has one more user than the Cyrillic script, a historic event that would rattle the foundations of our universe to their core.
10/10 comment. Thank you
This comment is so cute
Bengali-Assamese script has already surpassed the Cyrilllic script atleast a year ago. Currently there are 262 million Bengalis and 15 million Assamese who use this script which means it amounts to 277 million.
Also can you imagine Bengali being the 6th most spoken language even though their landmass is so small compared to giants like Chinese or Spanish. Another fun fact is that they are the 3rd most biggest ethnicity in the world but are divided.
If you do that, then you should also count the number of muslim who recite the Quran. While most of them can't understand what's it's actually mean, they still can read and write it.
For Kanji you missed Palau. Ironically Palau is the only country where Japanese is recognized as an official language. :)
Meanwhile Singapore is proud that its the only country to recognize Tamil as an official language (as many Indians there are traditionally descendants of migrants from India's southeastern Tamil Nadu state, probably as it's the nearest state to Singapore, but more recent migration probably comes from many other Indian states too)
japan?
@@zerotwoisreal In Japan it is de facto, but not de jure
In Angaur State only
0:42 - measure 1: number of countries used/offficial in
2:39 - measure 2: number of languages using each script
7:10 - measure 3: number of people using the script
Coming from Serbia, I think learning multiple scripts as a child was a huge advantage
As a Bulgarian, do not let latin supersede Cyrillic!
@@cerebrummaximus3762
cyhirilic is a monks freak alphabet designated for second class population in bizantine empire
a knee made construct ,go ahead with ego nationalistic absurdity
Serbian ,Croatian example use Latin alphabet very easy .
Ukraine considered the Latin but postponed because of costs .
@@longjohnny009 If you are unaware of history, aim not to speak. If you'd enjoy, I'd dissect your poorly written comment, but every flaw you have typed can be corrected by yourself via a quick Google.
@@cerebrummaximus3762Atleast you understood, I had 20 strokes reading the comment they wrote
1:21 Cyrillic alphabet is still official and widely used in Kazakhstan. The transition is slow, inconsistent and hasn't superseded the Cyrillic yet
Yea, was there, didn't see latin at all except for money and some governmental things
@@HeroManNick132Uzbekistan have been transitioning to Latin for more than 30 years now, and they still miss every deadline including latest in 2023, it's not like Kazakh script will suddenly become Latin-based by 2025.
@@ДарийФедореев-э7тZero Cyrillic emissions by 2050!
Bulgaria: *sigh of relief*
@@ДарийФедореев-э7т Uzbeks are 100% latin except for old people in undeveloped villages, I think that's a full transition
Most of Muslims, generally able to atleast recognize, let alone read The Arabic Script since We read Quran in Arabic. But The Arabic Script in Quran use somekind of A "Reading Sign" called Harakat
Harakat aren't exclusive to the Quran, we simply rarely need them, children's books, for example almost always have them, we even use them in daily life and casual conversations if a more difficult word or a word that has multiple meanings comes up
Another interesting metric would be the amount of printed material or content published online. I think Chinese would be the winner there, but it's just a conjecture.
Yes and according to that metric, Chinese is the second most popular language on the internet.
@@thecomment9489 Russian language actually gave Chinese "a run on its money" when it came to number of websites, and internet activity. Perhaps this has since flipped.
@@ilyakasnacheev I've seen those statistics, but they seem highly questionable. It's possible that in the methodology for gathering that data they ignored the chinese internet entirely.
You forgot to mention that Chinese is also used in Vietnamese in a form of Chu Nom and it was academically standarized recently. It's still used in parts of China by the Gin community and some people in Vietnam. Chunom is also used by Tai ethnic groups of Vietnam and its version is related to Zhuang's sawndip.
what is blud yapping about
literally no one uses it today blud
I live in Vietnam. Traditional characters are used on a few temple gates only and nobody can read them.
its like 100 years ago
@@rachel_penguin And it's still being taught by revivalists that want to keep the writing system alive. in China and Vietnam
There is one metric you totally missed, although I don't know if it is actually mesurable, and that is how many actual text are created in each script on avarage in a given period of time (Eg daily, yearly etc.)
that one's good
That's a good point, since we're talking about writing systems and things being written!
Published works? The numbers are
Latin Alphabet
Chinese Characters
Arabic script
Devanagari
Cyrillic script
If you mean just online usage like social media etc considering access to internet in each of the areas
It'd be
Latin Alphabet
Chinese Characters
Devanagari
Arabic Script
Cyrillic script
@@debodatta7398 guesswork or data-based?
Source? @@debodatta7398
1:30 As a Serbo-Croatian native speaker, this was spot on. Just something to note: Serbian nationalists tend to use Cyrillic a lot, as it's their "national script", and some Croats may not be able to read Cyrillic at all because it's not taught there anymore (though it wouldn't be very hard to learn, as they can be written 1:1)
Serbo Croatian Cyrillic is pretty cool. Then again, Cyrillic is just cool in most of the Slavic languages that use it. I speak some Russian and it’s so nifty how it sort of fits together like a puzzle. It really just seems to get Slavic languages (perhaps because it was made for them). Representing palatalized consonants is usually so ugly in the Latin script (serbo Croatian does a better job than some other languages in my opinion). I just really hate seeing an apostrophe used for that purpose.
As a Bulgarian, do not let Latin supersede Cyrillic :)
Don't make Cyrillic a "nationalist" thing, its just the official script of Serbian, its the most commonly used script in Serbia for writing on paper and is thought in school first and foremost (tho latin comes soon after but it is payed way less attention as I have completely forgotten cursive latin even tho i did learn it)
@@valeradelasantos7893
cyhirilic is a monks freak alphabet designated for second class population in bizantine empire
a knee made construct ,go ahead with ego nationalistic absurdity
Serbian ,Croatian example use Latin alphabet very easy .
Ukraine considered the Latin but postponed because of costs .
That video took a lot of work! Respect, and thank you for that. 👍
For Arabic you forgot the newest country in the list Mali which removed French from its official languages and officialized others including Arabic
I would consider the amount of content produced and consumed using the script to be the most important factor, honestly
I suspect, this is very hard to evaluate
@@happyelephant5384 I think it's very easy, and it obviously will be Chinese characters, than Cyrillic. Much rarer I could see Arabic/Korean, and even rarer everything else.
@@KnightOfEternity13 I meant, in practical sense: how do you objectively calculate consumed content? Get data from every computer, phone? How to compare it? What is "bigger" tik-tok video or post in Facebook? Is all content equal? Is technical literature as important as massive amount of twitter and Facebook posts? And many other questions . This would be highly subjective measure, imho.
@@happyelephant5384 I agree that it can be hard to make a exact calculation, but I think you don't doubt that USA produce more content than, for example, Montenegro.
There're different ways to calculate it, from website share to amount of published books and scientific papers in a given country.
Usually you can look at country GDP for a very rough estimate
@@KnightOfEternity13 obviously, USA vs Montenegro is easy. But Spanish vs English vs Chinese vs Arabic probably isn't thaaaat easy. Or Russian vs Sanskrit vs French.
While mentioning India with many different writing systems I think that Indonesia should not be overlooked. Many different ethnic groups used their own writing system (e,g, Java and Bali) or used Arabic for their local language (Aceh and Minangkabau (West Sumatra)).
But Bahasa Indonesia with its use of the Latin alphabet is marginalising all other systems at a somewhat alarming rate.
How does languages in indonesia work? I'm curious. Is it used in government offices and schools. Do they produce media (movies and such) in their languages. Or is used just for speaking with themselves
@@AJYT690 it's really complicated.. every region learn their language + Bahasa Indonesia. Formally for government uses we use bahasa indonesia.
@@AJYT690 it really depends on the ethnicity and the person’s personal background. The ethnicities with a smaller population often don’t speak their language in daily conversation, only adding certain words to their dialect of Indonesian. But people who live in generally homogenous areas, so either rural or a city in Java would speak their language daily.
Also, for example, I’m of mixed Sumatran ancestry so my parents speak to each other in Indonesian and I was raised speaking Indonesian.
And another thing would be that the Chinese language is dying amongst the Chindo population. Traditionally Chinese people in Indonesia were split between Peranakan (Chinese whose culture and traditions have syncretised with indigenous cultures) and Totok (Chinese people whose culture and lifestyle are similar to Mainlanders). In Indonesia the Chinese community is becoming more Peranakan whilst in Malaysia and Singapore they are becoming more Totok. This is because Jakarta’s Chinese population is historically Peranakan, and some Chinese words (gue = I, lu = you) have become standard Indonesian vocabulary.
@@voicelessuvularplosive 👍
@@ycantiusegeorgiantextforhandle interesting! Thank you for the reply
In egypt we also kind of use a modified form of the latin script called franco which uses numbers to write sounds tjat dont exist in the latin script
My Lebanese friends also do that. Iraqis use digraphs such a kh instead.
I often hear this argument about "sounds that doesn't exist in the Latin script". No sounds exists in the Latin script. But languages apply modifications, such as English using "sh" and "ch" or Polish using "ś", "ń" and "ż". A lot of languages have made adjustments to make the Latin script fit much nicer into the language, and if other languages are going to do it, they should make adjustments too.
@@Liggliluff I ment that the base latin script doesnt represent the sounds, I just wanted to say something that I know about.
Well what we do is unoffical, but we do also sometimes use it in movie or show titles under arabic text,
The diffrance is that we use numbers
Here is a list
2 = glottel stop
3 = the ع sound
'3 = the غ sound
7 = the ح sound
Kh = خ
@@justaduck1664 Base Latin script I assume you mean A-Z, but letters don't have sounds. It's depending on the orthography. Some have Z represent /z/, some have it represent /ts/, and you could just as well have it represent ح for its shape.
@@Liggliluff thats actually a pretty good point
So given that the Arabic script won one category and was a contender in another, it's the winner? 🧐
It is still impressive that the Latin alphabet is used in some way in almost all countries - even where this script is not one of the official languages. There are many reasons for this: the fact that English is a compulsory subject in schools almost everywhere, globalization, US market dominance or in countries like China, where they learn the Latin letters before their own characters so that they know how to pronounce them. This system is called "Pinyin".
Colonization
@@omarsarameh - One of the best aspects about the west. ;)
@@Reatman what ??..
@@omarsarameh
Civilization
While Kashmiri Hindus do sometimes use Devanagari for Kashmiri, overwhelming majority of Kashmiris can’t even read Devanagari. Neither is Devanagari official writing system for Kashmiri. Kashmiri is written in a modified version of Perso-Arabic script and that is what is official. And that is what is taught in schools.
Also, wouldn't it be beautiful, if problematic, that Bosnian were still written in Arabic script, so you would have the three for Serbocroatian: Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic? But alas the world is not so perfect.
Belarus once had a population of Muslim nomad cavalry which wrote Belarussian in Arabic script.
you could also add glagolitic in there as it was used historically to write the language(s)
There are different versions of Arabic writing: Ajami for West African languages, Aljamiado/Morisco for European Spanish, and other versions for Indian and Southeast Asian languages, as well as one for Chinese.
yeahh like jawi for malay!
HAY GENTE ESCRIBIENDO ASÍ EN ESPAÑOL???
@@MrTHF españa tiene una gran influencia árabe
@@lilacfields ya lo sé, vivo aquí. De lo que no tenía ni idea era de la peña escribiendo español con ese sistema de escritura. Quiero decir, no sé si se hace actualmente o si es algo del Al-Andalus
And Pegon script for Javanese,sundanese,madurese,and Indonesian/bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia
2:42 and then there exists someone who designed 42 conlangs in powerpoint under which two cyrillic ones which you don't _have_ to count since they are not official lol
ನಮಸ್ಕಾರ ನಾನು ಕರ್ನಾಟಕದಿಂದ ಮತ್ತು ನಾನು ಕನ್ನಡ ಲಿಪಿಯನ್ನು ಹೆಚ್ಚಾಗಿ ಬಳಸುತ್ತೇನೆ 💛❤️
Beautiful script!
🇮🇳 > 💛❤️
Croatian can also be written in Cyrillic (because it's actually serbo-croatian duh).
Yes but Croats don't use it. Cyrillic isn't officially used in Croatia and Croats in general don't know how to use it.
Well yes, but that's like saying Hindi can be written in the Arabic script, and Urdu in Devanagari.
@@HeroManNick132 You CAN actually write Serbo-Croatian using the Arabic script lol (Arabica)
So the final ranking is :
1- Arabic
2- Chinese Characters
3- Cyrillic
4-Devanagari
I think you forgot Mongolia when counting countries that use Cyrillic officially
He did mentioned Mongolia. He was saying that they use Cyrillic, but are currently undergoing a process of transitioning to using a different script (the indigenous Mongol script, the one written top to bottom)
@@largedarkrooster6371 My bad, I didn't notice
@@samizayed1126 no problem. Just here to help 👍🏽
I made a little table, in which I assigned points to writting systems based both on users and number of laguages. (ignoring countries used as I considered not important).
I took your order giving 4 point to first and one to last.
And I got Cyrilic as a looser, but the other three just came tied, at 5 points each. Damn.
So normalizated to 100 based on the one that scored the most for the two categories and dividing each other in that value, and for 10 on the country category (as i deemed least important).
So, the second most used writting system came up for the Arabic one, followed by a close tie (Not again!!) for Chinese and Devanagari. Cyrilic again at last.
Just for curiosity, Cyrilic is used in a variety of programming languages, while Chinese, Arabic and Devanagari are extremely rarely used, or used just by educational languages.
This bring me the question, What ammount of books are printed in each system?, which at the end is the objetive of a writting system.
Análise muito boa. Como quase toda medida feita nas atividades humanas, os resultados dependem das definições e critérios adotados.
AS A CHINESE, I JUST KNOW ABOUT 500 DIFFERENT CHINESE CHARACTERS BUT THIS ENOUGH FOR DAILY LIFE.
THIS 500 DIFFERENT CHINESE CHARACTERS ARE THE BASIC/COMMON WORDS OF CHINESE LANGUAGE. EACH ONE IS A SINGLE/ELEMENT WORD. 90% OF VOCABULARY OF CHINESE LANGUAGE ARE COMPOUND WORDS WHICH MORE THAN 2 CHINESE CHARACTERS COMBINING TOGETHER LOGICALLY, SUCH AS
飛機=FLYING MACHINE=AEROPLANE
電視=ELECTRONIC VIEW=TELEVISION
電腦=ELECTRONIC BRAIN=COMPUTER
JUST LIKE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN WRITING, CHINESE CHARACTERS ARE CAME FROM SIMPLE PICTURE. THE CHINESE DO NOT USE ALPHABET.
❤ I use the first three scripts-latin,as I had English medium education; devnagari,as I was educated in Lucknow; Arabic, because I speak Urdu since I grew up in Lucknow, on a daily basis ❤
Was it possible to count the usage of different scripts for the same language and take literacy into account?
Let’s make it a point system. 4 points for 1st place and 1 point for last.
Devanagari 1/2/2=5
Cyrillic 3/4/1=8
Chinese 2/1/4=7
Arabic 4/3/3=10
Winner Arabic.
You've left out an important contender. Emoji. It is a writing system used by nearly every literate person with a cell phone, regardless of language. (So really, it's not a contender for 2nd place at all. It's number one!)
and it is most closest to: 汉字
😂
Emoji is part of Unicode and can be used on any platform, like computer or console as well.
For Chinese, you entirely miscounted. You counted the major families, but each of those have hundreds of related languages under each. China has hundreds of languages, not all of them even Sinitic, using Hanzi. It should be in first place in individual language count.
But then again, how many of these Sinitic languages actually have a standardized writing system? And how many speakers just use the language in speaking, but write in Mandarin?
@@maxim_ml A few of the languages, primarily non-Sinitic, have their own writing systems including logogrqphies, syllabaries, and alphabets. The rest, mostly Sinitix but also non-Sinitic, use Hanzi.
@@Nemo_Anom oh yes the non-sinitic languages do have their own writing systems
i like how each of these won in some way
2:35 wait a moment, CHINA OUT OF ALL PLACES? Sure, there is a sizable community of people who may use arabic (aka chinese muslims) but i never expected the script to have actual official status there, but now: today i learned.
देवनागरी literally means language from Nagar(City) of Dev(Deities). U can write any word correctly from this Writing system & are Phonetic
Yes, very phonetic, like how you write बहुत but say बोहोत।
@@Rolando_Cueva It's read as Bahut, Only some stupid & unaware people say Bahot it's their accent problem but In my area we read it Only Bahut not Bahot like how illiterate LoL
@@Indian_Rajput Ah yes, linguistic prescriptivism. That's not how languages work Rajput bhai.
@@Indian_Rajput भगवान जाने तुम्हें ये तीन लाईक मिले। खड़ीबोली सुनो, बहुत को बोहोत जैसा ही बोलेंगे। भाषाएँ बदलती हैं, मेरे दोस्त, कुछ नहीं कर सकते - थोड़ी इज़्ज़त दिखाने के सिनाय।
राजपुत तो मैं भी हूँ, और मैं कह सकता हूँ कि हालाँकि देवनागारी मुझे बहुत पसंद है और कई सारी अच्छाइयाँ हैं, ख़राबियाँ देखे बिना इन अच्छाइयों की क़ीमत भी कम हो जाती है। जो है, उसकी तारीफ़ करो! देवनागरी बढ़िया है पर कामिल नहीं।
@@yanwato9050 Abe Murkh Khadi boli is a dialect Boli means Dialect, Dialect is different from language even Bhojpuri is considered dialect even Crores of people know Bhojpuri. There are many dialects Awadhi, Marwari, Haryanvi, Rajasthani etc they didn't recognise as language they comes under banner of हिंदी
latin, cyrillic, dev gari, arabic, chinese, korean, japanese, georgian, armenian, mongolian, burmese, tamil, telugu, kannada, khmer, thai,
Moldovan was written in Cyrillic in the USSR days... I wonder if that has completely disappeared.
Moldovan “language” is still written in cyrillic in Transnistria
@@HeroManNick132 the question was whether Moldovan was still written in cyrillic or not, you may rarely find it in Moldova proper, whilst it is very common in Transnistria. That’s all that I was saying.
moldovan isnt a language
@@Dwarfplayerseems anywhere under the (in)direct kremlin control, any languages besides russian show off
For instance, Ukrainian is still supposed to count as one of the official languages in the occupied Crimea, yet people are being literally sued for using it publically (except for when one is sanctioned to). Likewise, never met anyone from Transnistria speak Romanian (or “Moldovan”) nor Ukrainian, even among people with the respective passport, russian only. This may differ from someone else’s experience though
@@nonameuserua
Transnistria is a kgb mafia separatist unit
70% there are not Russian but they are imposed ,forced to speaking occupant language .
they closed Romanian ,Ukrainian Bulgarian etc schools there for ru sification .
Now many normal Russians there started to send children's in Chisinau to learn Romanian because they don't have future in Transnistria crime regime
Imo hangul uses Chinese characters way too rarely for it to count. Japanese also uses primarily its own characters and will often put the pronunciation of a Kanji in japanese characters above said Kanji
putting the pronunciation on top of kanji (also known as furigana) is also quite rare and is only used in stuff like comics or books for children
Yes, Japanese has made some changes to the kanji characters which differ from Chinese. But the majority of Japanese kanji is still understandable for people who are literate in Chinese, and vice versa (not talking about pronunciation here).
In the same way, every language that uses Cyrillic has its own set of special characters. Not even the Slavic languages agree on one unified alphabet. And when you get to the various languages of central Asia, it gets wild.
Also, languages like Persian and Urdu have their own variations of the Arabic script. Still they are clearly recognizable as Arabic script.
Japanese primarily uses kanji with kana almost entirely used for grammatical markers, some government work, and children.
Kana is about as used in Japan as hanja is in Korea, which you said is too rarely used to count.
@@deathpigeon2No it isn't "as rarely used as hanja in korea" lol
A given text may have more kana than kanji and you'll find many phrases written entirely in kana. How is that like hanja at all. Kana and Kanji are both used very often. And Kana isn't just used for those things... Are you stupid?
@@deathpigeon2 Excuse me? That's not accurate. Both Kanji and Hiragana take up a good amount of most sentences together. Many words (especially adverbs and onomatopoeias) are only written with hiragana, all verbs have their grammatical aspect, tense, and mood marked by hiragana, and nouns usually have a "particle" marking case after them that's written in hiragana.
Now, Katakana is more situational, that is true. Its mostly used for foreign loan words, which can be a significant amount of a sentence when talking about things like technology, but they are rarer.
You also might be getting it confused for furigana? Furigana are small hiragana sometimes placed above a kanji to tell pronunciation. Theyre really only used for people learning to write or weird, irregular kanji readings.
Counting by numbers of users and by number of countries of use are definitely the least interesting ways to think about this. It's the creation of scripts for languages and their adaptation to other languages that makes writing scripts complex and fascinating.
i think the emojies are the real second most used "writing system" xpp
One thing to note is most of the 1.9 billion Muslims around the world can read Arabic via the Quran, even if they can’t speak a language that uses the script. So Arabic would actually top the chart all together
Yes, I do agree on you
I think it's important that it's living languages, otherwise you could just make a conlang with 300 different vocabularies.
7:03 Unacurate Count :
Maybe Forget to Include: ¹ Javanese Pegon (Java) ²Sundanese Pegon (Sunda) ³Peghu (Madura) ⁴ Osing Pegon ⁵Sorabe (Malagasi) ⁶Bawean Pegon, ⁷Kangean Pegon , and ⁸Jawi Script(Malay), Jawi Aceh (Aceh) and Another Arabic Abjad Adoption in SouthEastAsian Languange .❤
Which font did you use for Devanāgarī?
@@Sam_00178 what is the name of the font?
alr, so being chinese, i can tell with full confidence, china has at least more than 100 languages in the hanzi script. Ppl just call them dialicts cuz unity and all
Tbh Turkic languages could revert to Arabic-based script (like the Uyghurs and Azerbaijanis in İran). As many countries using Latin script have modified and created new letters to represent sounds in their languages, the Turkic countries could do the same with Arabic script.
nah
They could but why should they?
Latin has clearly more benefits in this time, also Arabic script is flawed anyway, because it misses vowels, and also unreadable on the web, because it's basically cursive.
Yeah, Uyghur alphabet doesn't have any letters that represent vowels, and Chinese is unreadable on the web too because they're basically logograms.
Correct: Unreadable for europeans and americans.
@@eleftheriaethanatos The only thing that they are used to it and lazy to change, so they prefer to struggle with it.
But why change the better thing for the worse, if you already use the superior and more universal script?
@@KnightOfEternity13 Arguably logograms are better. Why? Becuase of information density. You don't write ten thousand, nine hundred and thirty-two in full, you write 19132.
And your "and"->&, percent->"%. Don't forget all the currency signs, math symbols, etc. We already use logograms, not just the alphabetical script because it is a nice shorthand, essentially.
Hell, if you look at this further, logograms can be used in all languages. Whether "1" is read as 'one', 'yi', 'uno' in those languages, it doesn't matter, because from this symbol, you can tell that it is indeed the concept of "one", because these are a universal logograms
My native languages are in the Arabic script, this didn't surprise me!
Another measure is families of writing systems. Greek, Roman and Cyrillic are in the same family; so are Arabic and Hebrew; Chinese and Japanese; and there are quite a few related to Devanagari...
@qazaq-qyiat Understandable because Mongolian script looks more like a rotated Semitic script than a Chinese one
Hi. Belarusian language also have arabic and latin scripts.
It may be a fine point but I would not include Chinese characters since each character is a word unto itself. Also I've always said Roman script instead of Latin.
What If number/numeric also included in writing system for secondary categories ..??
Regarding Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia & Herzegovina; Bosnia and Herz predominantly uses the Latin script in the federation of Bosnia, with a majority cyrillic in Republika Srpska (The two places being of similar size and population), Montenegro has the Latin script in the lead, but Serbia uses cyrillic script the most (All three in terms of use in writing text.)
Source: I am Serbian.
officially Somali uses the Latin script, though there might be Somalis that also use the Arabic script
It's because Somalia speaks Arabic as well
@lowfloatsmath From my knowledge, Arabic is official but virtually hardly anyone has working proficiency of the language.
Arabic script is somewhat used also in the Philippines, especially in Mindanao languageS, since there's a lot of Muslim groups in that place.
Quality content. 🍷
Keep it up.
With Hindi and Marathi as the first language it should be 700 million easily
I'd like to mention Romanian, which is always written with the Latin alphabet except in Transnistria, where it's always written with Cyrillic
Formerly Vietnamese language used Sinograph but they changed it now to the generic Latin writing 🤦🏻♂️
Biggest mistake Vietnam did was abandon Chinese writing
@@j-twd930 yeah
@@j-twd930could you explain why?
2:24, the flag for Mauritania is wrong, the flag includes 2 red stripes at the top and bottom, and it was updated from the old flag (the one used in the video) to the new flag in 2017, this video was uploaded in 2023, so he got the flag wrong. this nerdy ahh comment was written by a vexiollogist.
@5:51 What about the Modi script of Marathi?
Its dead unfortunately
0:15 *Bro, isn't the 🇧🇩Bengali (বাংলা) alphabet the World's 5th most-used Writing System instead of Cyrillic with over 300 million users??*
Arabic got 1 first place and two second places
فوز واضح 🌹✨
Most used writing systems(2024)
Latin(USA,Argentina,etc)
Arabic(Palestine,Iraq)
Kanji(Japan,Malaysia)
The latin alphabet is barely used today, the latin script is most widely used.
Plot twist: There are more people living in areas where the latin script isn't the primary one compared to those where it is.
You also have to take into account speakers of multiple languages
3:38 The amogus character at the corner
انا اتفق👍
the number of users is the most important, languages don't care about borders, borders can change... Imagine an area with hundreds of countries speaking the same language, and one big country with hundred of diffferent languages...
nakakatuwa pa nga tignan 'yung itsura ng Sirilikong Alpabeto. minsan naiisip ko "ano kaya kung ito gamit naming paraan ng pagsulat" haha pero ito itsura kung 'yun man
Ганито сигуро перо 'ди ако сигурадо кугн тама пагкакагамит ко хаха.
Looks pretty nice, if you ask me. Especially that ганито сигуро part.
And thus the icon for translation became A/あ
You should have skipped counting the countries and languages. Population, number of people using a script, is all that matters.
Of the three, I would agree it's the most important. However, a good case has been made in these comments for taking into account the volume of text produced.
Every 10 kms cuisine changes and every 20 dialects changes
Welcome to India 🇮🇳
But poor mentality never change
thats our speciality@@SandeepSingh-or7jr
it's quite annoying to differentiate between dialects and languages. in my chinese hometown for example, i am unable to understand the people from the southern or northwestern parts of the same city, despite being all within the "mandarin" language, "guanzhong" dialect, "xi'an" subdialect. the phenomenon is even more profound in southern china.
while pretty much every portuguese speaker i know can understand spanish (latin america) just fine, and vice versa...
All Slavs can understand each other. Meanwhile in the Chinese world, not only are dialects of Mandarin not intelligible but even completely different familles like Cantonese or Hokkien are counted as "dialects".
Writing system is about writing, not about speaking, thus there is no reason to count by languages. But I don't know is there reason to count by users because there could be more chinese speaking countries, where they'd use chinise character. But, I rather reckon that it makes sense to count by number of countires because legislation is written in their language with their writing system.
languages, countries where official status
It's not Arabic script but modified Arabic scripts with extra letters. You should use the term scripts derived from Brahmi characters. Then it will be second.
That would be more accurate for the "Chinese characters" as well, as while it's not _really_ wrong, each of the countries that use it have some characters that differ from the others or write the same characters slightly differently.
They're all recognizably from the same source, but have since diverged from each other.
So won't we count French as a Latin script because it has more letters? scripts don't take into account the letters but the shape of the letters.
That applies to every major script: most countries using the Latin script add their own characters, Cyryllic also has variations (e.g. Ukrainian has letters that Russian doesn't use and vice versa), the Japanese kanji characters are not exactly the same as the ones used in China (and even China doesn't use exactly the same charavters everywhere) and so on.
Accent marks do count for the latin alphabet as it is extended for phonology or to discern words.
@@MaoRatto even if by 'accent marks' you meant all diacritics, including stuff like ź, ž, ř or ö - there's plenty of languages that add brand new letters to Latin alphabet, like ł, ø, œ, ð, ɘ and so on.
Any Idea about the 2nd most spoken language of the world, when excluding everyone that speaks English?
Your title is misleading. This is a video about the 2nd most widely used writing script, not system.
Kashmiri is written in Arabic script.
Does arabic not have official status in Israel? It anyways should count since so many Israelis speak Arabic
AKB48(language)
Akiba
Phonology
Vowels a i u e o aa ii uu ee oo
Consonants p t k b* d* g* m n s ch j* h w y r ng
Used in loanwords
26 letters
0:10 all I see is colonialism (Is this not a map of colonialism?)
No, cuz countries in europe were never colonized and a lot were never colonial powers. Other than that, how else do you think writing systems travel, countries dont just decide to switch
3:54 You are missing languages like Okinawan, annnd I wouldn't count dialect groups as one language due to their limited intelligibility or unintelligibility, therefore I would count things like Wenzhounese and Shanghainese separate languages.
If you go by Japanese... there's also the thing with what's a dialect vs what's a language with Hachijou as an example being classified as its own language while there are possibly dialects of similar unintelligibility.
4:16 there they are! The Ryukyuan languages...
4:22 I'd count around 300 languages considering the mutual intelligibility of the spoken languages... though written, the dialect groups of Chinese can be considered to have one written language for many languages each.
Make a video on what script look the coolest
Clearly it’s the Tibetan script
Clearly it is the Language of the Hans 《汉字》 and the Language of the Wind ༼ པོད ༽
No it is freaky Bengali তঢূঢরগ্য
7:08 Ukrainian is listed twice lol
There is 182 languages in Russia alone, and 181 of them use Cyrillic.
respect for recognising palestine as a country when listing arabic script countries.
Unfortunately he loses a point of respect by recognizing t3rr0rist Azerbaijan as owning Artsakh.
pretty interesting
You didn't mention pinyin which is the official latin script for at least Mandarin. I guess it has as many users as Hanzi.
If you take into account People of countries who can write and read the alphabet, arabic alphabet took the second place. 51 countries and sizable percentage of 1.8 billion muslim.
You missed Romanian/Moldovan in languages that use Cyrilic. In Transnistria (de iure part of Moldova, but in reality they are independent from it, with the support of Russia) is Moldovan still officially written in Cyrilic (as was the case in all of Moldova until USSR dissolution and until 1860 in Romania. (Because Moldova has its own army, Moldovan is a language and not just a dialect of Romanian.)
cyhirilic is a monks freak alphabet designated for second class population in bizantine empire
a knee made construct ,go ahead with ego nationalistic absurdity
Serbian ,Croatian example use Latin alphabet very easy .
Ukraine considered the Latin but postponed because of costs .
Another point is that scripts like Gujarati and Gurmukhi are basically devnagri with some modifications. If you count those, you will find that number to be much higher. Also, as others have mentioned, this only counts native speakers. And most people who speak Gujarati or Indian Punjabi(Gurmukhi script users) can also speak in Hindi and use Devanagari. So Devanagari is likely #3 in this after Latin and Han.
Gujarati and Gurmukhi are as far away from Devanagari as Bangla-Ahomiya is from Devanagari
As someone who can read and write Hindi and Urdu scripts ,I can read Gujarati but not Punjabi. Gujarati is close to the Hindi script IMHO.@@banimalhalder723
Before the Russian Empire colonise central Asia they use the Perso-Arabic script script and Swahili use the Arabic script
Swahili users in Tanzania and Kenya mostly use latin script