Khwarezmian Alphabet

The Khwarezmian alphabet is an extinct right-to-left abjad script with 21 consonant letters ^[1] used to write the Khwarezmian language, an Eastern Iranian language spoken in Central Asia from the 2nd to 14th centuries CE. As an abjad, it writes only consonants; vowels were inferred by the reader. The script is encoded in Unicode 13.0 at U+10FB0–U+10FDF.

Yes — Khwarezmian and Chorasmian are two names for the same language and script. ^[4] "Chorasmian" is the name derived from the ancient Greek name for the region (Chorasmia), while "Khwarezmian" comes from the Persian-Arabic tradition (Khwarezm). Linguists and scholars use both terms interchangeably. The ISO 639-3 code is xco for both. ^[3]

Khwarezmian was spoken in the Khwarezm oasis region — centred around the lower Amu Darya river delta south of the Aral Sea, in what is now northwestern Uzbekistan and adjacent parts of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. ^[2]

This fertile oasis region was one of the ancient world's most sophisticated civilisations, producing the renowned scholars Al-Biruni and Al-Khwarizmi, whose name gave us the word "algorithm".

Khwarezmian belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. ^[3] Its closest relatives are Sogdian (spoken in Sogdia, modern Tajikistan/Uzbekistan) and Bactrian (spoken in Bactria, modern Afghanistan).

These three languages together formed the principal literary and commercial languages of Central Asia during the first millennium CE. Modern Iranian languages like Persian and Pashto are more distantly related.

The Khwarezmian language gradually became extinct over the 13th–14th centuries CE. ^[2] The major turning point was the Mongol invasion of the Khwarezm region in 1221, which devastated the region's population and urban centres.

After the invasion, Persian became the dominant literary language, while various Turkic dialects spread as spoken vernaculars. By the 14th century CE, Khwarezmian had ceased to be spoken as a living language.

The Khwarezmian script is written right to left, following the same directionality as its ancestor Imperial Aramaic and related scripts such as Sogdian, Hebrew, and Arabic. ^[1] The script is a cursive abjad, meaning letters can join with adjacent letters much like modern Arabic script. The Unicode standard encodes its characters with right-to-left directionality in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane.

Yes. Khwarezmian (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 block was officially named "Chorasmian" (using the Greek-derived name for the script), though it encodes exactly the same writing system also called Khwarezmian. ^[4]

The Khwarezmian (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 Khwarezmian (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 Khwarezmian text:

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

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

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

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