Grantha alphabet, writing system of southern India developed in the 5th century ad and still in use. The earliest inscriptions in Grantha, dating from the 5th–6th century ad, are on copper plates from the kingdom of the Pallavas (near modern Madras). The form of the alphabet used in these inscriptions, classified as Early Grantha, is seen primarily on copper plates and stone monuments. Middle Grantha, the form of the script used from the mid-7th to the end of the 8th century, is also known from inscriptions on copper and stone. The script used from the 9th to the 14th century is called Transitional Grantha; from about 1300 on, the modern script has been in use. Currently two varieties are used: Brahmanic, or “square,” and Jain, or “round.” The Tulu-Malayalam script is a variety of Grantha dating from the 8th or 9th century ad. The modern Tamil script may also be derived from Grantha, but this is not certain.

Originally used for writing Sanskrit only, Grantha in its later varieties is also used to write a number of the Dravidian languages indigenous to southern India. The script has 35 letters, five of them vowels, and is written from left to right.

Brahmi, writing system ancestral to all Indian scripts except Kharoshthi. Commonly believed by scholars to be of Aramaic derivation or inspiration, Brahmi first appears as a fully developed system in the 3rd century bce, and its most notable instance is on the rock edicts of Ashoka (reigned c. 265–238 bce). Brahmi is semialphabetic, each consonant having either an inherent a sound pronounced after it or a diacritic mark to show another vowel; initial vowels have separate characters. In most cases Brahmi and its derivatives are written from left to right, but an early coin discovered in the state of Madhya Pradesh is inscribed with Brahmi characters running from right to left, and there are instances of Brahmi written from right to left in Sri Lanka, although these are rare exceptions.

Among the many descendant scripts of Brahmi are those of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, such as Devanagari (used for Sanskrit, Hindi, and other regional languages) and the Bengali and Gujarati scripts; those of the Deccan region, including the scripts for Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada; the script for Sinhala in Sri Lanka; that of Tibetan in the Tibetan Highlands; and several alphabets in Southeast Asia, including those for Thai and Khmer.

After the positional decimal system was perfected by Indian mathematicians, forms of the Brahmi numerals for 1 through 9 diffused throughout the world, ultimately evolving into the numerals used in modern Devanagari in the Indian subcontinent, the Hindu-Arabic numerals used in Europe and the Americas, and the East Arabic numerals used in the Middle East.

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Charles Preston.