The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas used in South Asia and Southeast Asia. The individuals abugidas may be called Brahmic scripts or Indic scripts. The term Nagari is also used for those Brahmic scripts that are used to write Indic languages.
Brahmic scripts are ultimately descended from the script for ancient Sanskrit. The most prominent member of the family is Devanagari, which is used to write several languages in India, as well as Nepal, including both Indic languages and Dravidian languages. Burmese, Cambodian and Thai are also written in Brahmic scripts, though with considerable modification to suit their phonology.
Characteristics include:
- The inherent vowel is short 'a' (in Bengali, it is short 'o', which comes from Sanskrit short 'a'). Other vowels are written by adding to the character.
- 'u' is written below, short 'i' is written to the left if distinct from long 'i'.
- Consonants can be combined. Special marks are added to denote the combination of 'r' with another consonant.
- Nasalization is written with a dot above the letter.
Urdu, a language native to India, uses the Arabic alphabet, not an Indic script.
