The English language can be communicated in two primary ways: aloud in its spoken form or written down using its alphabet. This system is the most common approach found in modern languages around the world, although not by as wide of a margin as you might think. According to Ethnologue, there are 7,170 living languages, of which 4,153 (57.9%) have a developed writing system. That means that the remaining 3,017 are strictly oral languages, with no known system for preserving them beyond audio recordings. On the other side of the spectrum, there are some languages that aren't expressed through speech at all. The most familiar of these for most people are sign languages, which are strictly visual, but there are also sonic languages that don't use what we think of as speech. The best example coming to mind here are the whistled languages found frequently in mountainous, rural areas, like Silbo Gomero from the Canary Islands or languages like Chinatec and Mazatec in Oaxaca, Mexico, which are used to communicate over long distances.
All of this is to say that language can be a more diverse and complex thing than many people think of at first blush. This can be useful knowledge for sci-fi and fantasy writers because it expands the ways you can envision communication, especially if your focus includes other forms of life beyond humans. Here are a smattering of other writing systems and communication approaches for anyone who's looking for a more unique way to have their characters share information and ideas.
Non-alphabet writing sytems
The alphabet is by far the most common writing system used by modern Earth languages. Getting even more specific, the Latin alphabet—which is the one used by Western European languages like English, Spanish, French, and German—is by far the most common approach. Of the 2,378 written languages listed on Omniglot, 1,906 (80%) use the Latin alphabet. Cyrillic (149, 6.2%) and Arabic (112, 4.7%) are a distant second and third.
And, technically—in a very push-the-glasses-up-the-nose kind of pedantic way—Arabic isn't an alphabet. Strictly speaking, it's an abjad, where all consonants have a symbol but vowels are often omitted and must be inferred through context, or are expressed using diacritic marks or dots added to the base consonant's symbol. For a writing system to qualify as an alphabet, it needs to use a standardized set of symbols which each correspond to a phoneme (a grammatical sound), and every phoneme has a symbol. This doesn't need to be an exact one-to-one correspondence, as is evidenced by English. The phoneme expressed by a letter can change depending on things like which letters come before or after it. But the general gist is that speakers can learn standardized rules to correctly pronounce a word they've never heard before just from reading the letters. That's another key trait of an alphabet—the symbols express sounds, not ideas. Seeing an unknown word spelled out can give you a good idea of how to pronounce it, but the letters alone won't help you figure out what it means.
This isn't the only way to make a visual record of a spoken language, however. There are a couple of other approaches still in use by living languages, and even more that were used by now-dead languages. Here are some examples, starting with the closest to an alphabet and ending with the most distinct.
Syllabary
A syllabary is like an alphabet plus. Instead of each symbol representing a single phoneme, each symbol represents an entire syllable, usually a consonant sound paired with a vowel. Other than this, syllabaries work just like alphabets: symbols are grouped together into words, and those groupings gain meaning that must be learned separately. The symbols themselves only express a sound, not what that sound might represent.
One difference between alphabets and syllabaries is that there are usually more symbols in the latter. The typical alphabet runs around 20-40 letters, but in a syllabary there can be 100 or more. The Katakana and Hiragana Japanese writing systems are the most widely used syllabaries in the modern world. Each of those has 46 base characters along with 25 variants formed using diacritics and 33 compound sounds formed by combining characters, for a total of 104 represented syllables. Other examples of syllabaries can be found in American languges, including living ones like Cherokee and Chee and ancient scripts like those of the Olmec and Maya.
There's also a variant known as an abugida, or alphasyllabary, where each symbol represents a consonant with an inherent vowel sound, which can be changed by altering the base symbol. Hindi (or technically Devanagari, which is also the script used to write Nepali) is an example of this approach, as are Thai, Burmese, and Khmer.
Logographic systems
In the sequence of alphabet to syllabary, a logographic system is the next logical step up the ladder. In these writing systems, each symbol represents an entire word, or at least a meaningful unit of language. This represents a significant shift from the above writing systems in that each symbol conveys two pieces of information: both how that word sounds, and what it means.
Logographic systems are efficient in the sense that you can express more information in fewer characters. The flip side of this, however, is that there are many, many more symbols to learn. There are often patterns behind how symbols are formed that can allow a relatively fluent speaker to make some sense of an unfamiliar character, but you can't as effectively “sight-read” an unknown word in a logographic language as one in a language with an alphabet.
The most widely used logographic system in the modern world is Chinese, which has over 100,000 total characters. Not all of those are in regular use, though. According to Hutong School, you can read over 99% of written works if you know around 3,500 characters, and the average well-educated native Chinese speaker can recognize around 6,000. Egyptian hieroglyphics are another well-known example, as is the cuneiform script used by the Sumerians. Hieroglyphics often use pictograms or pictographs, which is when the symbol resembles what it represents. Symbols representing abstract ideas are known as ideograms or ideographs.
Most logographic systems express both the meaning and the sound of a word, but some express only meaning. An example of this is the constructed language Blissymbolics, which was designed to be a universal written language to facilitate global communication. The 2,000+ symbols in the language each represent an idea, but there is no associated spoken language—someone reading a Blissymbolic sentence aloud could do so in any spoken language.
Tactile systems
Sight and sound are humans' two most dominant senses, so it makes sense the majority of active communication happens in those domains. But our third most dominant sense is touch, and that can also play a role in communication. In the modern world, it's mostly used by those who are blind. Braille is the most widely used system, and most of us have probably seen it enough to recognize it on sight, even if we don't how how to read it. It uses a grid of 6 dots arranged in patterns to represent different letters, which can then be read with the fingertips. Another well-known system is the Moon alphabet, which uses simplified variants of Latin letters to represent them in raised form for blind readers.
Writing systems specifically designed to be read by touch seem to be a relatively modern invention. Ancient scripts dating back as far as the Sumerians were often engraved in stone or pressed into clay tablets, which means they can be read by touch, but they didn't use a distinctive script—the same shapes could be read by sight, too.
Textile systems
Writing systems are the main approach most human civilizations have used to record their language, but some have instead used cloth, threads, or other textiles to record and convey information. The example that is likely the most well-known is the Quipu, which was used in the Andean region of South America as far back as 2500 BCE. These are sets of cords that are knotted in a specific pattern to express information. The color, material, and number of cords can also convey information, along with the placement and style of the knots tied into them. Some quipu were used for numerical data, where it's fairly easy to see how a sequence of knots could be interpreted, but there were also narrative quipu. And this isn't a writing system that died out with the Incan Empire. People in the village of San Juan de Collata in Peru used quipus for record keeping until the 1940s.
Other cultures have used textiles to record lineages, document accomplishments, or send messages. One example is the Wampum belt made by members of several tribes in north-eastern North America. These would use different colors of beads to form designs that could be read by anyone who understood the pattern, even if they spoke a different language (similar to the Blissymbolics system described earlier).
Other ways to communicate
Humans by and large default first to a spoken language. Even whistle languages can be generally lumped into the category of “assigning meaning to sounds made with our mouths.” Some spoken langauges don't rely on words alone. In tonal languages, for instance, inflection and pitch are also critical to the interpretation of a word. There has also been at least one constructed language, Solresol, which doesn't use words at all, but instead has a system of 7 notes used in various arrangements and accent patterns to convey meaning. Solresol can even be notated on a three-line musical scale.
An adjacent form of communication is a pattern-based language like Morse code. One unique advantage of a pattern-based system is that it can be used for either visual or auditory communication. With Morse code, for instance, it can be communicated through a series of sounds, or by flashing lights. This is another system that, in the real world, is used to convey another language, rather than one that's self-contained. But there's no reason another culture couldn't develop an independent language that uses this same basic idea.
Often, alongside spoken language, humans use gestures and expressions to add to the meaning of the words. In some languages, these can take prominence. The most obvious example of this is sign language. In modern Earth usage, sign language is similar to braille in that it's derived from another spoken language and aims to convey the same meaning. There are over 100 of these around the world, each of which is used within a specific region or community. Many of these were invented for people who are deaf, but they can also be used in other contexts, like hunting or warfare.
Movement can be a form of communication more broadly, as well. On the Hawaiian islands, Hula was used as a form of communication, with certain gestures used to represent objects, actions, or concepts that they'd work together to tell stories. Aboriginal people in Australia also use dance to tell mythological stories, and the hand motions in Bharatanatyam dance from India are similarly linked to ideas that combine to tell a narrative. Outside of the human world, honeybees communicate via dancing, giving their companions directions on where to find food by wiggling their bodies.
And, if you're thinking up a language for a creature that evolved from something other than primates, you have a whole array of other options available for you. One common way that creatures in the animal kingdom communicate is through scent and pheremones. Even humans do this, to an extent. While humans don't produce true pheremones, we do release chemical signals that are a form of olfactory communication, though not consciously enough for most to be aware of or control it. Other species make use of scent more intentionally, and an intelligent, further-evolved version of them could well do the same thing.
I'm sure there are some other forms of communication used by some form of life on Earth that I've overlooked. The bottom line here, though, is that even among one species on one planet, there are a huge variety of ways that we can share ideas. Having an invented culture communicate in a less familiar way can help to establish their uniqueness for the reader, and opens up fun new avenues to explore when it comes to how you develop those characters and their world. Hopefully this overview of alternative writing systems has given some folks out there fresh ideas for how to use language in their stories.
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