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 descended from the Brahmi script for ancient Sanskrit, which in turn is believed to be descended from a Semitic script, thus they probably have a common ancestor with the European scripts. The most prominent member of the family is Devanagari, which is used to write several languages in India, as well as Nepal, including both Indo-Aryan languages and Dravidian languages. Burmese, Cambodian, Thai, and Tibetan are also written in Brahmic scripts, though with considerable modification to suit their phonology. The Siddham script was especially important in Buddhism because many sutras were written in it, and the art of Siddham calligraphy survives today in Japan.
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'.
In some of the scripts, some vowels consist of two symbols, one placed on each side of the consonant. With this concept, the English word 'boat' would be written "obat".
Consonants can be combined in ligatures. Special marks are added to denote the combination of 'r' with another consonant.
Nasalization is written with a dot above the letter.
Many languages using Brahmic scripts are sometimes written in Latin script, primarily for the benefit of non-native speakers, but this practice has made little headway in India itself.
Urdu, a language native to India, uses the Arabic alphabet, which is not an Indic script. However, it should be noted that there is a practice in India (as opposed to Pakistan) in which Urdu is also written in Devanagari script.
ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange) is a coding scheme for representing various Indicscripts as well as a Latin-based script with diacritic marks used to depict Romanised Indic languages.
So ISCII tries to encode the logical structure of the Indicscripts, while script-specific letter shape are expected to be selected by markup or font specification in rich text.
It is claimed that manually switching between scripts will easily achieve automatic transliteration, though this is not always straightforward as the various Indicscripts have incompatibilities among themselves that prevent round-tripping.
Although the Indicscripts are often described as similar, there is a large amount of variation at the detailed implementation level.
The treatment of combining characters in Indicscripts also necessitates the use of context-based rules in the font to ensure the correct positioning and behaviour of displayed glyphs (a glyph being the visual representation of an underlying character).
Where scripts use glyphs that hang from the baseline, rather than sitting on the baseline, it is important to ensure that any glyphs from another, intermixed script (eg.
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