Brahmi's descendants form one of the largest script families on earth. In the north its letters evolved through Gupta and Siddhamatrka forms into Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Odia and Tibetan; in the south into Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Sinhala; and beyond the sea, carried by traders and Buddhist and Hindu teachers, into the Mon, Burmese, Khmer, Thai, Lao, Javanese and Balinese scripts of Southeast Asia. Nearly every one of these serves a scriptural tradition: Pali Buddhist texts are written in Sinhala, Burmese, Thai and Khmer letters, Sanskrit in Devanagari and Ranjana, the Sikh scriptures in Gurmukhi, the Tibetan canon in a script modelled on Brahmi's Gupta stage. The family resemblance is structural: all keep the inherent vowel, the attached vowel signs and the systematic phonetic ordering of the alphabet, an ordering already fixed in ancient India by grammarians and itself a small monument of linguistic science.
Through the Ashokan edicts Brahmi is also tied to the earliest physical evidence of Buddhism, and inscriptions in it at Sanchi, Bharhut and the early cave monasteries record the donations of monks, nuns and lay devotees, the oldest written voices of the Buddhist community. A script known from stone for barely two centuries of active use thus stands behind the daily writing of well over a billion people.