The Musa Alphabet is a featural phonetic alphabet designed to write all the world's languages. It's encoded in the Private Use Area of Unicode, at E000-E2FF. Musa letters are each composed of two shapes, drawn from a set of 26, shown here on a standard keyboard (the two black keys are Backspace and Enter):

The Musa Alphabet is featural: the shapes represent phonetic features. For example, nasal consonants like m n ng alll feature a triangular top, and retroflex consonants all feature a zigzag bottom. And it's also iconic : letters share features with their sounds.

As mentioned on the Home page, Musa is featural - the shapes represent phonetic features - and iconic: letters look like their sounds. A nose looks like a triangle, with the point pointing upwards, so the Musa letters for nasal sounds - sounds made with your nose - all have triangles on top.

Since Musa is a universal script, it has letters for all the sounds we don't have in English, too! But you don't need to learn all those letters - just the ones for the languages you want to read and write.

In Musa, as in most scripts, they're written using letters for the starting and ending positions. But in Musa, only one of these two letters is a vowel - the other is a semivowel. If the ending position is more prominent, they're called rising diphthongs , and we write them with a semivowel onglide before the vowel.

The Romusa column in the list above refers to a standard set of transliterations of Musa into the Roman alphabet, the Musa version of X-SAMPA. Each Romusa code consists of a digraph - two letters - from the familiar 26-letter English alphabet.

The Musa dot letter is encoded at E040 separately from the normal Unicode space at 0020. The rule is that the space between Musa text and other text is the normal space, but the dot is used within Musa text.

Musa also has letters for labiodental stops, oral and nasal, even though those sounds only occur allophonically or in affricates: In addition, Musa has a letter for a labiodental approximant, a sound which appears in several languages; it's written ʋ in IPA .

There are several different ways to enter Musa text into your computer, but they all use the same program, the Musa Keyboards agent. You'll also need to install a Musa font on your computer (from the Font Downloads page).

To help you learn how to read and write English in the Musa alphabet, we offer a variety of learning aids. Use the one(s) you find most useful! Shape Names. Here are the names for all the Musa shapes: Picture Alphabet. Here are memorable images of all the Musa letters used for English: Color Vowels