Q&A for How to Create a Fictional Alphabet

It's great if you do, as it can certainly add another layer to your alphabet. But keep in mind that punctuation is used very frequently, so it may be best to use a simple design for these symbols. But it's really up to how you want your alphabet to look.

It depends on you. If you have a good memory or work hard on learning an alphabet, you can pick it up in no time. But dedication is important for retaining the information; it can be easy to forget an alphabet if you never use it.

This largely depends on how your language already looks. However, all cursive means is that the letters are joined together to write faster. So try to write words without lifting your pen. There may be a lot of trial and error, especially if your alphabet has highly varied characters.

You certainly could just use the Latin alphabet. In fact, if you are creating your own fictional language it may be beneficial to keep things simple in that way. However, if you aren't looking to make a constructed language and you just want to encrypt words in your own language, making a fictional alphabet is a simpler way to achieve that.

Much of this article can apply to abjads as well! At the heart of it, abjad writing systems simply do not include vowels. If you wanted to create a pure abjad, you would just have to omit any vowels. That being said, many modern languages that use the abjad system of writing (ie; Arabic and Hebrew) have some markers to show vowel noises. In Arabic, the consonants have diacritics representing a vowel to follow. So you can make all sorts of interesting diacritic systems for a creative looking abjad.

There is really no limit! As a real world example, the Japanese Hiragana system of writing has 48 base characters. Chinese is a special case as each letter represents a unique word, but there are over 50,000 characters. While that would be very difficult to make on your own, it shows that you can reasonably have many letters in your fictional alphabet.

Practice is key. One good way to practice writing in a fictional alphabet is to transcribe various passages of books or movies in your alphabet, perhaps with a key to your alphabet nearby. As you gain more proficiency with the letters, you can try and write without the key. As long as you keep practicing, you'll memorize the letters in no time.

You probably won't ever need to make an alphabet, but it can be useful for a variety of reasons. It could be useful when writing fiction, especially film, to add a level of uniqueness in an imaginary world. You can also make an alphabet to write hidden messages. At the very least, it can be fun!