Official script

An official script is a writing system a country's government uses to write government documents, such as laws, contracts, etc. An official script should not be confused with an official language, because writing systems and spoken languages are not the same. For many languages, the same language can often be written in different writing systems. For example, the Malay language can be written in either the Latin alphabet (rumi) or the Arabic alphabet (jawi).

Also, many languages have changed writing systems for political or religious reasons. For example, English was first written in Anglo-Saxon runes, but English later borrowed the Latin alphabet because Christian missionaries wrote Christian poems and books in English using the Latin alphabet so that the Anglo-Saxons could understand what the missionaries taught them. Also, in 1928, the Turkish leader Ataturk passed a law that said that Turkish must no longer be written with the Arabic alphabet, but now the language must be written in the Latin alphabet. Today, all signs and government documents are written in the Latin alphabet.