Countries of Asia: all 48 Asian countries in their own scripts

Nineteen scripts in one table

• 日本Japan Han
• ລາວLaos Lao
• ދިވެހިރާއްޖެMaldives Thaana
• საქართველოGeorgia Georgian

Arabic script is the most frequent, with 20 forms. Most of them are Arabic itself, from Bahrain to Yemen, but the same letters also write Persian ایران, Pashto افغانستان, Urdu پاکستان, Sorani Kurdish عێراق in Iraq, Tajik تاجیکستان and the Jawi spellings of Malay in Brunei and Malaysia. Latin follows with 13 forms and Cyrillic with six, in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Many scripts appear only once. Armenia, Georgia, Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, the Maldives and Sri Lanka each write their name in an alphabet or abugida used for no other row: Armenian, Georgian, Tibetan, Khmer, Lao, Burmese, Thai, Thaana and Sinhala. Han characters serve China, Taiwan and Japan and the Chinese form of Singapore, and Hangul both Korean states.

Arabic, Hebrew and Thaana are the right-to-left scripts of the table, and their cells are set in that direction. Israel carries one form in each of its two right-to-left scripts, ישראל and إسرائيل; Mongolia pairs Cyrillic Монгол улс with the vertical Mongolian script, ᠮᠣᠩᠭ᠋ᠣᠯ ᠤᠯᠤᠰ.

Asian country names that changed

Türkiye replaced Turkey as the English short name in ISO 3166-1 in 2022, after the Turkish state asked the United Nations to use it; the Türkiye page gives the dates. Timor-Leste is the ISO name of the country also called East Timor, Timór-Leste in Tetum.

Central Asia changed alphabets more than once in the last century. Turkmen has been written Türkmenistan in Latin letters since 1993, after decades of Cyrillic. Uzbek uses the Latin form Oʻzbekiston, and the older Cyrillic Ўзбекистон remains in wide use, so both appear in the row.