written language

The Rosetta Stone (196 BC) bears writing in three different scripts. Hieroglyphs (top) and Demotic (middle) record the same text in the Egyptian language, while an equivalent passage in Greek uses the Greek alphabet (bottom). These correspondences were key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early 19th century.

Writing is the act of creating a persistent, usually visual representation of language on a surface. As a structured system of communication, writing is also known as written language. Historically, written languages have emerged as a way to record corresponding spoken languages. While the use of language is universal across human societies, most spoken languages are not written. A particular set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which they encode a particular spoken language, is known as a writing system. In some rare cases, writing may be tactile rather than visual.