The Country Similarity Index attempts to quantify how similar countries are to each other relative to other countries. The index is a statistically-based way to measure this. 20% of the index is based on culture. 12.5% of a country’s culture score (2.5% of the overall Country Similarity Index score) is based on the writing systems a country typically uses.
Writing System
There are many writing systems that can be used to write languages. In some cases, a mutually intelligible language is written in a different script, based on the country. One example is Hindustani, which is written in the Devanagari script in India and the Nasta’liq script in Pakistan. Another example is Persian. It is written in the Nasta’liq script in Afghanistan, but in Cyrillic in Tajikistan, due to Russian influence. In addition, there are some languages which can be written in two different scripts, most notably Serbo-Croatian, which can use Latin or Cyrillic. Writing Systems were broken down into various categories based on script type, origin, and orthography.
Script Type
Four basic types of scripts include: Abjads, Alphabets, Abugidas, and Semanto-Phonetic scripts. Abjads only represent the consonants of words. Alphabets represent both consonants and vowels. Abugidas are consonant–vowel sequences that a written as a single character. Semanto-Phonetic scripts are characters that can represent ideas or sounds.
Script Origin
There are many different origins of writing systems and they are not always entirely clear. Greek, Latin, and Cyrllic were all derived from the Greek alphabet, so they look similar. Hebrew and Arabic have origins in the Aramaic alphabet. Northern Indian scripts come from Gupta script, while Southern Indian scripts mostly come from the Pallava script.
Basic Script
The most common writing system in the world is the Latin script. It is the only script used in the Western Hemisphere and Oceania. In addition, it is widely used in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. The Arabic script is mostly used in the Middle East. Russia, some Central Asian, and some Slavic countries use Cyrillic. Japanese is a special case, since its writing is a mix of Chinese characters and Hiragana syllabary native to Japan. There are no other scripts that are widely used by more than two countries.
Script Orthography
Although many languages use the Latin script, they often modify the alphabet to better fit the sounds in the language. For instance, German uses umlauts like ä, ö, and ü, Danish uses ø, å, and æ, and Polish uses ł, ś, and ż. Sometimes, completely different languages use essentially the same alphabet, like Swedish and Finnish or English and Indonesian. The Arabic script has also been modified to include vowels for Persian and Hindustani, creating the Nasta’liq script. Another interesting case is Chinese characters. They are used in China, Japan, and Taiwan, however China uses more simplified characters than Japan or Taiwan.
Wikipedia and Omniglot were the main sources of the data:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/types.htm
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