Arabic vs Han (Simplified variant)

Writing system comparison · ISO Arab vs ISO Hans

Arabic is a Living Right-to-left script from Middle Eastern (1,413 Unicode characters) used by 60 languages. Han (Simplified variant) is a Living Left-to-right script from East Asian used by 6 languages. A key difference is reading direction: Arabic reads Right-to-left, while Han (Simplified variant) reads Left-to-right.

مرحبا بالعالم
العربية
你好世界
简体中文

Side-by-Side Comparison

Attribute Arabic Han (Simplified variant)
ISO Code Arab Hans
Direction Right-to-left Left-to-right
Status Living Living
Region Middle Eastern East Asian
Characters 1,413
Languages 60 6
Script Type Abjad Logographic
Descended From Nabataean Han (Traditional variant)
Total Speakers ~291M ~1.1B
Introduced 400 CE 1956 CE
Unicode Ranges
U+0600–U+06FF
U+0750–U+077F
U+0870–U+089F
U+08A0–U+08FF
U+FB50–U+FDFF
U+FE70–U+FEFC
U+10E60–U+10E7E
U+10EC2–U+10EFF
U+1EE00–U+1EEF1

More Comparisons

Data sourced from the ISO 15924 registry, Unicode CLDR, and the Unicode Character Database.