Yi
Modern Yi — the Liangshan Standard Yi syllabary: over a thousand signs, standardized by committee in 1974 from the older, sprawling Yi script.
Curatorial note
Modern Yi is a rare thing — a script rationalised into being by a government committee, in living memory. The classical Yi script was ancient and sprawling: thousands of characters with countless regional and scribal variants, closer to a loose logographic-syllabic tradition than a fixed system.
In 1974 a commission in Sichuan selected and standardised a set — about 1,165 signs — for the Nuosu (Northern Yi) language, making it a clean syllabary in which each sign is one syllable, tone and all. It became official around 1980 and is now used in Nuosu schooling, publishing and signage.
Thousands of old variants, reduced by committee to a syllabary of about eleven hundred.
Where most scripts in this room were born from one designer's vision, Modern Yi was engineered by committee out of an older, wilder inheritance. Its makers are recorded not as a named inventor but as a state body — a distinction the Institute keeps in the Inventors' Room, where scripts of deliberate design are gathered.
Standardized by committee
From many variants to one syllabaryThe 1974 standardisation took the classical Yi script — thousands of characters with endless regional and scribal variants — and fixed a working set of about 1,165 signs for the Nuosu language. Each surviving sign was assigned one syllable, tone and all, turning a loose inherited tradition into a clean, one-sign-per-syllable syllabary.
A page of the syllabary
Representative signs · values per specialist sourcesAbout 1,165 signs make up the standardized set; this is a representative sample. The Institute assigns no uncertain values — reliable per-sign readings require specialist sources, so signs here are labelled generically (provenance-first).
Specimen — Noto Sans Yi
Waterfall on baseline gridIn the building
In the Reading Room
The Committee's Syllabary
How a 1974 commission turned the sprawling classical Yi script into a fixed syllabary of about 1,165 signs — a modern script made by standardisation, not invention.
Plaque sources: The Unicode Standard (Yi Syllables block) · ISO 15924 (Yiii · 460) · standard accounts of the Liangshan Standard Yi standardisation · ScriptSource (SIL). Signs shown are representative; uncertain values are not assigned; user figures are estimates. Compiled 2026-07.