Batak alphabet Origin The Batak alphabet, or surat batak, is descended ultimately from the from Brahmi script of ancient India by way of the Pallava and Old Kawi scripts. Notable features Batak is a syllabic alphabet – each consonant (aksara) has an inherent vowel. Other vowels or the absence of vowels can be indicated…
Bassa (Vah) alphabet The origins of the Bassa alphabet are obscure. Its name in Bassa is Vah, which means ‘to throw a sign’. The alphabet fell out of use in Liberia during the 19th century. In the 1900s, a Bassa by the name of Dr Flo Darvin Lewis discovered that former slaves of Bassa origin…
Basque (euskara) Basque is a language with no known linguistic relatives spoken by about 660,000 people mainly in the Basque country (Euskal Herria) in the north of Spain and the south west of France. An ancestral form of Basque known as Aquitanian appears in Roman inscriptions in Aquitaine, in the southwest of France. The inscriptions…
Bashkir (Башҡорт теле) Bashkir is a member of the Kypchak-Bolgar group of the Turkic languages. It is spoken by about 1.5 million people mainly in the Republic of Bashkortostan, in other parts of the Russian Federation, including Chelyabinsk, Orenburg, Perm, Kurgan, Samara, Saratov, Sverdlovsk, Tyumen regions, and also in Tatarstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan. Bashkir first appeared…
Bantawa Bantawa is a member of the Easter Kiranti branch of Tibeto-Burman langauges spoken by the Bantawa Rai people in parts of Sikkim and Nepal. An estimiated 390,000 people speak this language, and in Sikkim it is sometimes written with an alphabet known as Kirat Rai. Kirat Rai script Notable features Type of writing…
Banlehu/Banleiu The Banleiu (meaning ‘language letters’) alphabet was invented by Matt Youens for use in a fictional story he is writing. The language, ‘La Bangu’, was originally adapted from Lojban to generate character and place names, but Matt decided it would be an interesting exercise to develop a full writing system for the language…
Baniwa Baniwa is a member of the Arawakan language spoken in Brazil and Venezuela by about 6,000 people. The majority of speakers can be found in the municipality São Gabriel da Cachoeira in Amazonas State in the northwest of Brazil, where the language has official status. In Venezuela it is spoken between the Curipaco and…
Banaag syllabary The Banaag syllabary is the creation of Frederick Victor Paredes Añana. The syllabary is designed to write Tagalog and was to some extent modelled on the Tagalog (Alibata) syllabary and Japanese Katakana. The appearance of each symbol was inspired by various objects, body parts, human gestures and human activities. For example, the…
Bamum syllabary The Bamum syllabary was invented in 1896 by King Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum. The king also collected numerous manuscripts containing the history of his people, and used his script to compile a pharmacopoeia, to design a calendar, and to keep records and for law. He also built schools, libraries and set…
Bambara (Bamanankan) Bambara is a Mande language with about 3 million speakers in Mali, Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ghana. It is spoken principally among the Bambara ethnic group in Mali, where it is the national language and the most widely understood one. Writing was introduced to the Bambara…
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