Chorasmian Alphabet

The Chorasmian alphabet is an ancient right-to-left abjad script with 21 consonant letters used to write the Chorasmian (Khwarezmian) language. ^[1] As an abjad, it encodes only consonants — readers inferred vowels from context. The script derives from Imperial Aramaic and is related to Sogdian and Parthian scripts. It is encoded in Unicode 13.0 at U+10FB0–U+10FDF.

Chorasmian and Khwarezmian are two names for the same language and script. ^[4] "Chorasmian" comes from the ancient Greek name for the region (Chorasmia), while "Khwarezmian" derives from the Persian-Arabic tradition (Khwarezm). Both names refer to the extinct Eastern Iranian language spoken in the Amu Darya delta region of Central Asia. The ISO 639-3 code xco covers both names.

Chorasmian was spoken in the Khwarezm region of Central Asia — the area around the lower Amu Darya river, south of the Aral Sea, in what is now northwestern Uzbekistan and adjacent areas of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. ^[2]

The language was in use from approximately the 2nd century CE to the 14th century CE, when it was gradually replaced by Persian and Turkic languages following the Mongol invasions.

Chorasmian belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. ^[3] Its closest relatives among the Middle Iranian languages are Sogdian (spoken in modern Tajikistan/Uzbekistan) and Bactrian (spoken in modern Afghanistan). Among modern languages, it is distantly related to Pashto, Ossetic, and Persian — all part of the broader Iranian language family.

The Chorasmian Unicode block (U+10FB0–U+10FDF) contains 28 assigned characters total: ^[1] 21 consonant letters (U+10FB0–U+10FC4) and 7 numeral symbols (U+10FC5–U+10FCB). The block was added in Unicode 13.0 (released in 2020). The remaining code points in the 48-character range are reserved for potential future use.

Chorasmian is considered the least studied Middle Iranian language primarily because the surviving corpus of texts is very small. ^[4] Most Chorasmian texts are legal documents, coins, and short inscriptions.

The noted scholar W.B. Henning began a Chorasmian dictionary but died before completing it; the project was later continued by D.N. MacKenzie and is now part of an active digitisation effort. The difficulty of the script and scarcity of texts make Chorasmian particularly challenging to study.

Yes. Chorasmian was added to Unicode 13.0, released on 10 March 2020. ^[1] The script occupies the Chorasmian block at U+10FB0–U+10FDF in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).

Within this 48-character block, U+10FB0–U+10FC4 encodes the 21 consonant letters and U+10FC5–U+10FCB encodes the 7 numeral symbols. The remaining code points are reserved for future use.

The block was officially named "Chorasmian" — the Greek-derived name — though it encodes exactly the same script also known as Khwarezmian. ^[4]

The Chorasmian Unicode block sits in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane — a region of Unicode beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane that most system fonts do not cover. Fonts bundled with operating systems (Arial, Times New Roman, Helvetica, system UI fonts) focus on scripts in active modern use. Ancient or extinct scripts with no living writing community are typically absent from these default fonts.

When a browser encounters a Unicode character for which no installed font contains a glyph, it renders a fallback placeholder — typically an empty square (□) or a box containing a question mark or the code point. This is purely a font-coverage issue, not a browser bug or encoding error; the characters are correctly encoded in the HTML.

To display Chorasmian characters you need a font that covers the Unicode Chorasmian block (U+10FB0–U+10FDF). Noto Sans Chorasmian — part of Google's Noto project, which aims to cover every Unicode script — is the primary freely available font that supports this block. It can be downloaded from Google Fonts or the Noto GitHub repository.

To use it on a web page, declare the font with @font-face and apply the family to any element containing Chorasmian text:

@font-face {
    font-family: "NotoChorasmian";
    src: url("/public/assets/fonts/Noto/SansChorasmian/NotoSansChorasmian-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
    font-display: swap;
}

.chorasmian-text {
    font-family: "NotoChorasmian", sans-serif;
}

<span class="chorasmian-text">𐾰 𐾱 𐾲 𐿅 𐿆</span>

Once the font is loaded, any element with the chorasmian-text class will render Chorasmian glyphs correctly in the browser.