The Yi scripts (Yi: ꆈꌠꁱꂷ nuosu bburma [nɔ̄sβ̩ bβ̠̩mā]; Chinese: 彝文; pinyin: Yí wén) are two scripts used to write the Yi languages; Classical Yi (an ideogram script), and the later Yi syllabary. The script is historically known in Chinese as Cuan Wen (Chinese: 爨文; pinyin: Cuàn wén) or Wei Shu (simplified Chinese: 韪书; traditional Chinese: 韙書; pinyin: Wéi shū) and various other names (夷字、倮語、倮倮文、畢摩文), among them "tadpole writing" (蝌蚪文).
This is to be distinguished from romanized Yi (彝文羅馬拼音 Yíwén Luómǎ pīnyīn) which was a system (or systems) invented by missionaries and intermittently used afterwards by some government institutions (and still used outside the Sichuan province for non-Nuosu Yi languages, but adapted from standard the Han Pinyin system and used to romanize another syllary based on a subset of simplified Han ideograms). There was also the alphasyllabary (or abugida) devised by Sam Pollard, the Pollard script for the Miao language spoken in the Yunnan province, which he adapted for the Nasu language as well. Present day traditional Yi writing can be sub-divided into five main varieties (Huáng Jiànmíng 1993); Nuosu (the prestige form of the Yi language centred on the Liangshan area), Nasu (including the Wusa), Nisu (Southern Yi), Sani (撒尼) and Azhe (阿哲).
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