Syllabic alphabets

Syllabic alphabets, alphasyllabaries or abugidas consist of symbols for consonants and vowels. The consonants each have an inherent vowel which can be changed to another vowel or muted by means of diacritics. Vowels can also be written with separate letters when they occur at the beginning of a word or on their own.

When two or more consonants occur together, special conjunct symbols are often used which add the essential parts of first letter or letters in the sequence to the final letter.

The illustration on the right shows how some of the vowel diacritics (in red) are used in the Devanagari alphabet, and also shows a number of conjunct consonants.

Syllabic alphabets currently in use

Bengali	Buhid	Burmese/Myanmar
Cham	Dehong Dai/Tai Le	Devanāgarī
Ge'ez (Ethiopic)	Gujarāti	Gurmukhi (Punjabi)
Hanuno'o	Hmong	Kannada
Kayah Li	Khmer	Lao
Lepcha (Róng-Ríng)	Limbu	Malayalam
Manipuri	Oriya	Sinhala
Sorang Sompeng	Tai Dam	Tamil
Telugu	Thai	Tibetan
Varang Kshiti

Syllabic alphabets used mainly for decorative, ceremonial or religious purposes

Balinese	Batak	Javanese
Lanna	Lontara/Makasar	Ranjana
Redjang (Kaganga)	Sharda	Siddham
Sourashtra	Soyombo	Syloti Nagri
Tagalog	Tagbanwa

Syllabic alphabets that are no longer used

Ahom	Brahmi	Grantha
Kharosthi	Modi	Old Persian Cuneiform
'Phags-pa	Tocharian

Please note

transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are used extensively throughout this website. The IPA transcriptions are the letters and other symbols which appear in square bracketts, like this [b], [p]. etc.

You can learn which sounds are represented by these letters and symbols at:
http://www.unil.ch/ling/page30184.html
http://www.unil.ch/ling/page12580.html (en français)