What is the 2nd Most Widely Used Writing System?

It's clear that Latin is the most widely used writing system by far, but which one is the runner up? Out of Cyrillic, Arabic, Hanzi/Kanji, and Devanagari, which one is the 2nd most widely used?

[shwabb]

5:00
For anyone wondering, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Izhorian, and Veps were the languages written in Latin that did not get Cyrillized (there were attempts to do so but they did not succeed).

[drummerofawe]

Wow, I knew India had a huge variety of spoken languages but I had no clue how many unique writing systems were present for all of them. Considering how common it seems for writing systems to be generalized to new languages (often ones that they don't even represent all that well), there must be some fascinating history behind this diveristy in writing systems.

[tentathesane]

One slight caveat for the third point: You only counted the population *whose native language* used that script. In reality, most people in the world are bilingual. In India, even though only about 400 Million people speak Hindi as a first language, most of the country's population learns devanagari in school. Mostly because Hindi as a subject is compulsary in most schools for at least 5 years, and also a few other reasons (for example, sanskrit is the liturgical language for Hinduism, which about 80% of the country practices, and is the language of most of the scriptures, hymns and chants. I have seen some people write sanskrit hymns in the Kannada or malayalam scripts, but usually devanagari is most common, even among those who don't use it natively). As such, the actual number of people who understand and use the script is closer to a billion, probably more.

Also, you missed out on a dark horse for just population. For while it doesn't even come close to these Big 4 in terms of number of languages or countries, Bengali might just have usurped the number 4 slot from Cyrillic in terms of number of users. While it was pegged just short, at 272 million, this was in 2017 and the regions where Bengali is common have a far higher fertility rate than those where cyrillic is. Bengali might have just overtaken cyrillic, or might do so any day now. Imagine that! You will wake up any day now, thinking it's a regular day, but no! It is the day that the Bengali script has one more user than the Cyrillic script, a historic event that would rattle the foundations of our universe to their core.

[Zethlynn]

If you base it on the averages of the three results it's

Arabic 2nd
Chinese & Devanagari 3rd (this would need further deep dive)
Cyrillic 4th

[rockyhermitYT]

1:21 Cyrillic alphabet is still official and widely used in Kazakhstan. The transition is slow, inconsistent and hasn't superseded the Cyrillic yet

[CoolBoy-rt]

00:49 Boro, also known as Bodo, is my mothertongue. Its written in Devanagari script and belongs to Tibeto-Burman branch of Sino-Tibetan language family. It's Spoken in Northeastern part of India, the Indian state of West Bengal and Nepal.

[ZS-rwqq]

Coming from Serbia, I think learning multiple scripts as a child was a huge advantage

[revertrevertz]

For Kanji you missed Palau. Ironically Palau is the only country where Japanese is recognized as an official language. :)

[AquaEclipse]

0:42 - measure 1: number of countries used/offficial in
2:39 - measure 2: number of languages using each script
7:10 - measure 3: number of people using the script

[MrAllmightyCornholioz]

You forgot to mention that Chinese is also used in Vietnamese in a form of Chu Nom and it was academically standarized recently. It's still used in parts of China by the Gin community and some people in Vietnam. Chunom is also used by Tai ethnic groups of Vietnam and its version is related to Zhuang's sawndip.

[mancubwwa]

There is one metric you totally missed, although I don't know if it is actually mesurable, and that is how many actual text are created in each script on avarage in a given period of time (Eg daily, yearly etc.)

[cvp]

1:30 As a Serbo-Croatian native speaker, this was spot on. Just something to note: Serbian nationalists tend to use Cyrillic a lot, as it's their "national script", and some Croats may not be able to read Cyrillic at all because it's not taught there anymore (though it wouldn't be very hard to learn, as they can be written 1:1)

[ConlangKrishna]

That video took a lot of work! Respect, and thank you for that. 👍

[enamishalive]

alr, so being chinese, i can tell with full confidence, china has at least more than 100 languages in the hanzi script. Ppl just call them dialicts cuz unity and all

[alessioleporati]

Let’s make it a point system. 4 points for 1st place and 1 point for last.

Devanagari 1/2/2=5
Cyrillic 3/4/1=8
Chinese 2/1/4=7
Arabic 4/3/3=10

Winner Arabic.

[ewanherbert]

I would consider the amount of content produced and consumed using the script to be the most important factor, honestly

[farhanputrariantono]

Most of Muslims, generally able to atleast recognize, let alone read The Arabic Script since We read Quran in Arabic. But The Arabic Script in Quran use somekind of A "Reading Sign" called Harakat

[paulwaelder]

While mentioning India with many different writing systems I think that Indonesia should not be overlooked. Many different ethnic groups used their own writing system (e, g, Java and Bali) or used Arabic for their local language (Aceh and Minangkabau (West Sumatra)).
But Bahasa Indonesia with its use of the Latin alphabet is marginalising all other systems at a somewhat alarming rate.

[TheEternallyconfusedone]

In egypt we also kind of use a modified form of the latin script called franco which uses numbers to write sounds tjat dont exist in the latin script

[almami]

For Arabic you forgot the newest country in the list Mali which removed French from its official languages and officialized others including Arabic