An artificial or constructed script (also conscript or neography) is a term for new writing systems specifically devised by specific known individuals, rather than having naturally evolved as part of a culture like a natural script. They are often designed for use with conlangs, although several of them also are used in linguistic experimentation or other more pragmatic purposes. The most well-known conscripts are J. R. R. Tolkien's elaborate Tengwar and Cirth, but many others exist, such as the Klingon script and N'Ko. Some, like Hangul, Cherokee, N'Ko, the Fraser Alphabet , and the Pollard script , were invented to allow certain spoken natural languages that did not already have writing systems to be written.

Several neographies have been created for purely aesthetic reasons or to accompany conlangs; others were invented with more practical goals in mind. Some, such as the Shavian alphabet, Alphabet 26, and the Deseret alphabet, were devised as English spelling reforms. Others, including Alexander Melville Bell 's Visible Speech and John Malone's Unifon were developed for pedagogical use. Blissymbols were developed as a written international auxiliary language. Shorthand systems may be considered conscripts.

Some neographies have been encoded in Unicode, in particular the Shavian alphabet and the Deseret alphabet. A proposal for Klingon pIqaD was turned down due to the fact that most users of the Klingon language wrote it using the Latin alphabet, but both Tengwar and Cirth are still under consideration. A project exists to coordinate the encoding of many conscripts in specific places in the Unicode Private Use Areas (E000-F8FF and 000F0000-0010FFFF), known as the ConScript Unicode Registry.

See also

• Constructed language
• Fictional language
• List of fictional languages
• Voynich Manuscript

External links

• Omniglot Neographies
• Langmaker Conlang Neographies
• ConScript Unicode Registry