A CodeSights flagship for the linguistics and history crowd: 371 writing systems with their type, writing direction, period of use, ISO 15924 code, languages served and the genealogy that links them, each pulled from its {{Infobox writing system}}. The infobox's ancestral chain becomes Parent_Script (the immediate ancestor), Root_Ancestor (the oldest) and Ancestry_Depth (how many generations deep), turning the file into a family tree. The famous finding is that almost every alphabet descends from one root: follow Root_Ancestor and the Egyptian hieroglyphs seed 141 scripts, by way of Proto-Sinaitic and the Phoenician alphabet, from Latin and Greek to Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic and the Indic abugidas, dwarfing every other root by more than three to one. Type splits the world into alphabets (120), abugidas (118), abjads, syllabaries and logographies, and writing direction runs left-to-right, right-to-left for Arabic and Hebrew, plus boustrophedon and vertical. Created years span from the Egyptian hieroglyphs around 3250 BC to scripts invented in the 2010s, and Hangul stands out as a rare script designed from scratch in 1443 with no ancestors at all. The roster is a recursive crawl of Category:Writing systems kept to the pages that carry the infobox. Eleven acceptance tests anchored on Latin, Arabic, Greek and Hangul.
371 rows in one CSV file, with 15 columns in total: Script, Script_ID, Type, Direction, Period, Created_Year, Still_In_Use, Parent_Script, Root_Ancestor, Ancestry_Depth, Child_Count, Sister_Count, ISO_15924, Languages, Script_URL.
It is built by programmatically scraping en.wikipedia.org, last pulled on 2026-10-17. Datasets are versioned; older versions stay downloadable.
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Yes. The exact Python scraper that built it is viewable on the dataset page by any signed-in member, so every number is reproducible.
Parent_Script and Root_Ancestor join this file to itself as a script family tree; Languages links to Human Languages.
Automated scraping leaves room for error and the underlying sources change over time, so no version is guaranteed accurate or complete. If a number matters, verify it against the original source.