You have used IPA to document your language’s words and their features, but this chapter introduces other options for writing your conlang, beginning with a brief overview of different types of writing systems. The second section introduces romanization strategies, which utilize standard keyboard characters to represent sounds in a language. The third section discusses how you can adapt an existing orthography to your conlang, provided it makes sense for your speakers to have access to that existing orthography. Finally, the fourth section discusses the process of creating a unique orthography if that is the direction you want to take for your language. By the end of this chapter, you will decide how you might romanize your language and whether you will use an orthography to represent the written form of your language.

Chapter 11 focuses on one of the most important events of the last 5,000 years: the development of writing. Writing is defined as a system of more or less permanent marks used to represent an utterance in such a way that it can be recovered more or less the same way without intervention. Writing is distinguished from ideograms that represent things or concepts directly. Readers are introduced to alphabets in which, though imperfectly, each letter represents one sound, syllabaries which represent the syllable, abjads, in which, typically, only consonants are written, and abujidas, in which each consonant is represented with a basic vowel. The chapter includes examples for each type of writing from many different languages. The history of writing is summarized, from its beginnings in Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica, to modern day writing in different parts of the world. Each new concept introduced is amply illustrated with images from different types of writing systems, and readers are encouraged to try to understand how reading should proceed in each case.