The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. The Phoenician alphabet has been classified as an abjad because it records only consonant sounds (with the addition of matres lectionis). However, the Greek alphabet, a descendant of Phoenician, modified the script to represent vowel phonemes as well. The distinction made between "abjad" alphabets and later alphabets like Greek that incorporate vowels more systematically, however, tends to confuse alphabets with "transcription systems," and there is no reason to relegate the Phoenician alphabet to second class status as an "incomplete alphabet" (see the critique by F. Coulmas, Writing Systems [Cambridge University Press, 2004], page 113).

Phoenician became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it was assimilated by many other cultures and evolved. Many modern writing systems thought to have descended from Phoenician cover much of the world. The Aramaic alphabet, a modified form of Phoenician, was the ancestor of the modern Arabic and Hebrew scripts, as well as the Brāhmī script, the parent writing system of most modern abugidas in India, Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia. The Greek alphabet (and by extension its descendants such as the Latin, the Cyrillic and the Coptic), was a direct successor of Phoenician, though certain letter values were changed to represent vowels.