Before the advance of Islam in Transoxiana (early 8th century), Khwarezmian was written in a script close to that of Sogdian and Pahlavi with its roots in the Imperial Aramaic script. From the few surviving examples of this script on coins and artifacts, it has been observed that written Khwarezmian included Aramaic logograms or ideograms, that is Aramaic words written to represent native spoken ones e.g. 𐿃𐾾𐿄 (ŠNT) for سرذ, sarδ, "year", 𐾾𐿁𐿃𐾺 (NPŠY) for خداك, xudāk, "self" and 𐾽𐾼𐾻𐾰 (MLK') for اى شاه, ī šah, "the king".10
After the advance of Islam, Khwarezmian was written using an adapted version of the Perso-Arabic alphabet with a few extra signs to reflect specific Khwarezmian sounds, such as the letter څ which represents /ts/ and /dz/, as in the traditional Pashto orthography.11
Main article: Chorasmian (Unicode block)
Khwarezmian script was added to the Unicode Standard in March, 2020 with the release of version 13.0.
The Unicode block for Khwarezmian, called Chorasmian, is U+10FB0–U+10FDF:
Chwarezmischer Wortindex. pp. 686, 711. https://archive.org/details/ChwarezmischerWorterindex ↩
D. N. Mackenzie. "The Chorasmian Language" In: Encyclopedia Iranica. Online access at June, 2011. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/chorasmia-iii ↩
Andrew Dalby, Dictionary of Languages: the definitive reference to more than 400 languages, Columbia University Press, 2004, pg 278. /wiki/Andrew_Dalby ↩
MacKenzie, D. N. "Khwarazmian Language and Literature," in E. Yarshater ed. Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. III, Part 2, Cambridge 1983, pp. 1244–1249. ↩
Encyclopædia Britannica, "Iranian languages" (Retrieved 29 December 2008) http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/293577/Iranian-languages ↩
CHORASMIA iii. The Chorasmian Language http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/chorasmia-iii ↩
MacKenzie, D. N. (1990). The Khwarezmian Element in the Qunyat Al-munya. Psychology Press. ISBN 9780728601611. 9780728601611 ↩
Henning, Walter Bruno; MacKenzie, D. N. (1971). A fragment of a Khwarezmian dictionary. Lund Humphries. ISBN 9780853312925. 9780853312925 ↩
Pandey, Anshuman. "Proposal to encode the Khwarezmian script in Unicode" (PDF). https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18010r-khwarezmian.pdf ↩
THE KHWAREZMIAN GLOSSARY—I, D. N. MacKenzie Link http://www.azargoshnasp.net/languages/Khwarazmi/khwarezmiangl1.pdf ↩