ABSTRACT
The history of the written forms of the IA languages mainly concerns the ancient Brāhmī script and its numerous varieties and derivatives over more than two millennia. From the time of the earliest surviving documents and down to the present day, most of the IA languages have used one or more of these scripts. There are, however, some important exceptions. In ancient times, Gāndhārī, the IA language of the northwestern fringe of the South Asian cultural area, was written in the Kharoṣṭhī script (see 3.2), which is not directly related to Brāhmī. Since medieval times, several of the NIA languages, most notably Urdu, have been written in adapted forms of the Perso-Arabic script (5.1), and in modern times these scripts are the principal ones used for the various IA languages of Pakistan as well as for some IA languages in India. In recent centuries the Roman script (5.2) has also sporadically been used in connection with some IA languages. Despite these important exceptions, on the whole the history of the writing systems used to write the IA languages is intimately linked with the Brāhmī script family.
