Japanese Kana Script

Timeline

1. c. 800–900Heian-kyō court and temples · Kyoto PrefectureIn the early Heian period, monks and scholars in their practice of man'yōgana writing cursive-ized Chinese characters or extracted their radicals to form the strokes of early hiragana and katakana, laying the foundation for phonetic writing.
2. c. 900–1000Heian-kyō aristocratic society · Kyoto PrefectureKana became the preferred script for aristocratic women and literati to record waka, diaries, and tales, forming a gendered division of writing with the classical Chinese used by men, and promoting the flourishing of kana literature such as the Tosa Nikki and the Makura no Sōshi.
3. c. 950–1000Japan · JapanThe forms of hiragana and katakana were gradually standardized through court transcription and transmission along poetic lineages; the fifty-sound arrangement and syllable correspondences became stable, establishing the framework for the later Japanese written language system.