The Linguist’s Calendar: July 11

Azerbaijan

July 11  

1939: Azerbaijan officially adopts Cyrillic script for the writing of Azerbaijani.
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EXTRA for today from Mikael Parkvall's Limits of Language:

Most Popular Writing Systems

The vast majority of the world’s literate people use writing systems of European or Chinese origin. Counting only those able to read and write (numbers usually available only at the country level) and the writing system in which they are most likely to have learned to do so, we arrive at the following, very approximate, figures: Roman 42.5%; Hànzi 26.2%; “Indic” 16.7%; Arabic 6.7%; Cyrillic 5.5%; others 2.4%.
 

Hànzi is the writing system used for Mandarin and other Chinese languages, and which also provides the backbone of Japanese writing. “Indic” here refers to both direct and indirect descendants of the Brahmi script. These include the writing systems used for most languages of India and adjacent countries as well as much of south-east Asia. “Others” include other scripts in current use such as Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew (related to Arabic), Greek (from which the Cyrillic script stems), Korean, and Amharic.