Fonts for World Scripts: 62 Writing Systems, Sources and Dictionaries

Why some scripts need a special font

Every native-script name on Endonym Atlas is stored as Unicode text. Whether it shows up correctly depends on the fonts on the reader’s device: a phone or computer can only draw characters for which some installed font has a glyph. Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and the big Asian scripts are covered by default almost everywhere. Rarer scripts, such as Buginese, Pahawh Hmong, Ogham, Old Persian cuneiform or Meitei Mayek, may appear as empty boxes until a suitable font is installed.

The table below lists, for each writing system on the site, the languages written in it and the font originally chosen to display it. Many of these fonts date from the early 2000s, when a single free font covering a script was rare. Each has been checked again for 2026: some ship with Windows, some are still offered by their makers, some have been replaced by newer versions, and several can no longer be obtained from any legitimate source.¹ Those have no download link; the last column names a maintained alternative instead.

For most scripts that alternative is the Noto family, which Google publishes under the SIL Open Font License with one font per script, so Noto Sans Glagolitic for Old Church Slavonic in Glagolitic, Noto Sans Tifinagh for Berber and Noto Sans Canadian Aboriginal for Cree, Inuktitut and Ojibwa. A Noto font is named only where the Google Fonts catalogue lists it.¹ Two writing systems in the table, Klingon and Tolkien’s Tengwar, have no official Unicode encoding and use private-use code points, so no standard font covers them.

Two older fonts are worth naming separately. New Athena Unicode, made for classicists, covers polytonic Greek and Coptic and is still free under the SIL Open Font License. Akkadian by George Douros, used here for cuneiform in Akkadian and Sumerian names, has kept being updated but is no longer a free download; Noto Sans Cuneiform covers the same Unicode block.¹

Sources and credits

The country, subdivision and language names on Endonym Atlas come from many sources. Among the most useful are Gwillim Law’s Statoids for administrative divisions, KNAB, the place names database of the Institute of the Estonian Language (Eesti Keele Instituut), and Lexilogos, a French site with dictionaries, keyboards and maps for hundreds of languages, which also offers the multilingual keyboards used for typing Amharic, Bengali, Katakana, Sinhala, Ukrainian and many other scripts.

For Unicode itself, the Unicode Consortium publishes the standard and its code charts, and Alan Wood’s Unicode resources list fonts by script and test pages for each block. Languagegeek covers the writing of Native North American languages, Omniglot describes writing systems of the world, and the Gallery of Unicode Fonts by Wazu Japan shows what each font looks like.

Many embassies and diplomatic missions helped by checking and correcting country names in their own languages.