Chapter 9. Scripts of India and Southeast Asia

In this chapter, we'll look at the third major group of writing systems, usually referred to as the Indic group. It is the biggest single group of scripts in Unicode, comprising a whopping 19 scripts. Fortunately, they have a lot in common.

The geographic area covered by the Indic scripts extends from Pakistan in the west to Cambodia and Laos in the east, and from Tibet in the north to Sri Lanka in the south.[1] Several different language groups are represented in this area, although the writing systems are all related.

[1] My sources for the information in this introductory section are Colin P. Masica, “South Asia: Coexistence of Scripts,” in The World's Writing Systems, pp. 773–776; Richard G. ...

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