The boxes at left list many of the world's major languages, first in their own script, and then in the Shwa script. How many of them can you read, or even identify?

The Shwa script is another way of writing English and all these other languages, an alternative to this Latin alphabet and the many other scripts of the world. Why would we want another alphabet, when we already have this one? There are two main reasons:
1. because the Shwa alphabet is a better alphabet for English than the Latin alphabet is, and
2. because Shwa is a universal script that can be used to write most of the world's languages.

I don't have to explain to you that English spelling is crazy - you learned that in school. You had to learn that why, rye, sigh, buy, tie & hi all rhyme, but that rough, cough, though, through & bough don't. And you probably have a dictionary (with pronunciation guide) or a spell checker nearby.

Having crazy orthography not only makes it harder for us all to learn to read and write while growing up, but it also makes it harder for speakers of foreign languages to learn English and for us to learn their languages. How are we supposed to know that the Champs Elysées is pronounced shawn zayleezay?

But why don't we just fix English spelling, keeping our familiar alphabet? Well, many people have tried to do that, but it turns out that the results aren't as familiar as you'd think. Here are some examples:

By the time you've learned how to spell and read familiar words all over again, you might as well learn a new alphabet, especially if it's better.

The Shwa alphabet isn't the first new alphabet for English, either. One of the best is the Shavian alphabet (named after George Bernard Shaw), which looks like this:

But the Shwa script may be the first universal script, designed to be shared by many languages. And it has only 16 basic shapes (at right, along with three accents and a space), so it's easy to learn and makes keyboards much less complicated than, for example, the one on your cell phone.

Those shapes pair up to form lots of letters, but each language will only use the ones it needs. For instance, English uses only 37 of the letters. Each letter might be pronounced slightly differently for different languages - an English t sounds subtly different from a Hindi t - but we don't really care: each language just uses the best letter for each of its sounds.

The Shwa script is also featural: letters share features with their sounds. For example, rounded vowels are round, and closed vowels are closed. Sounds made in the front of the mouth face towards the front (left), and sharp sounds are sharp letters. As a result of this metonymy, letters that sound alike look alike.

As you can see at left, the Shwa script can also be written in several different gaits: as an alphabet, as an abjad, as an abugida, or as a syllabary. This helps Shwa look familiar all over the world, and adapts it to the needs of each language. But all these gaits still use the same letters, so everybody can read it.

For those of you now thinking "This is a stupid idea, because ...", I offer answers to some of the questions I've heard. For those of you who are simply curious, open-minded or returning to this page with their questions answered, why not take a quick look at Shwa?