Depends on what you mean by most common . Most modern languages use an alphabet because 85 % of written documentation is in the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets . By # of individual kinds of writing systems that exist in the world , then it ' s abugidas , but their use is mostly limited to southern Asia . However , the most commonly developed writing systems are pictologograms though they tend not to last , which then quickly become Abjads , which disseminate into impure abjads , and so on and so forth . Incidentally , there ' s only two languages that use syllabaries commonly , as syllabaries tend to be a stepping stone to other writing systems and don ' t tend to last longNuosu aka Yi and Cherokee . Yes , I know that Japanese has Hiragana and Katakana , but those are used in conjunction with Kanji , which makes the Japanese writing system a mixed writing system , like Hieroglyphs . They no longer constitute a system individually . For whatever reason , syllabaries are not liked as a means of writing . Fun fact !