This chapter shows that the Slavic scripts roughly align with the cultural division between Slavia Orthodoxa and Slavia Latina. Although the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition of the Glagolitic script connected to the Old Church Slavonic language was originally not confined to either of the two areas and the Glagolitic script was used longest in Catholic Croatia, it is nowadays continued in the form of the Cyrillic script, whereas the Latin alphabet in Slavia Latina is based on a completely different, ‘Western’ tradition. However, mutual influences abound and can be seen in script changes and various instances of biscriptality as well as in the introduction of roman type in the West in the sixteenth century, the adoption of its design principles in the ‘civil type’ in the East in the eighteenth century, and the gradual replacement of both blackletter and Old Cyrillic, which was (almost) completed only in the twentieth century.

This chapter is intended to offer assistance for the linguistic description of writing systems throughout the history of one or, especially, several languages and provide a comparative description of the different units of writing systems. The first section establishes the definitions of the concepts of grapheme, graph, allograph and suprasegmental grapheme. The application of these concepts to English and Romance languages is exemplified by three models and methods of diachronic and comparative description of writing systems: Romance scriptology, cultural history of European orthographies, and comparative graphematics of punctuation. The second section discusses biscriptality, the phenomenon of employing two or more writing systems for the same language, not rare in the history of languages from different families, and related to different aspects of society and language users. With examples mainly from Russian and other Slavic languages, biscriptality is shown to be present on several levels of written language, and various applications of biscriptality are characterized with the help of dichotomies such as synchronic vs. diachronic biscriptality, monocentric vs. pluricentric biscriptality, and societal vs. individual biscriptality.