All currently-known characters of Stray's Primary and Secondary alphabets.
There are multiple alphabets used in Stray, and they are all described here.
When under isolation and with the humans long gone, the robots started to live their lives in the city. As a part of their evolution, they came up with their own alphabets and language, to communicate with each other.
The most obvious alphabet is the English (and occasionally French) writing, written in their usual "Latin" characters: the A-Z, a-z upper and lower case alphabet range that you are reading right now.
English: "N.eco corporation"
Pseudo-English[]
Often, the other alphabets are used not for their own meanings, but instead just to represent letters in the Latin alphabet.
Pseudo-English: "Viv" and "Koola".
Primary alphabet[]
Annapurna Interactive employee Jon_AI has confirmed that there is no official name for any of their in-game alphabets, saying "Regarding names -- we do not have more canonical names for them." The fan community has been calling this one the Primary alphabet, as it was the first to be decoded. However, there was an embedded TTF font file found embedded in the game by user Dmgvol. This contained the Primary alphabet, fully confirming that the decoding had been correct, and it bore the filename "hk_droid", so that name has also been used for this alphabet.
The Primary alphabet is a simple character replacement for English letters, with no differences made between upper or lower case. It does not seem to be directly based on any preexisting alphabets, though it takes inspiration from several.
For example, the writing style in which is it used can sometimes be similar to Korean Hangul, in that instead of just writing characters vertically, they are written in "blocks": three to five letters written from top left to bottom left, then top right to bottom right, and then repeating in another block below, as can be seen here:
The text NIGHTCLUB in the Primary alphabet, as two Hangul-style blocks.
This is arranged as two Hangul-style blocks:
NI H
G T
C U
L B
First public decode[]
It is hard to tell who was first on publicly decoding this alphabet, as so many people were working on it independently, and the release day was very chaotic. But either ygdrad's Reddit post or Josh Wirtanen's blog post (and second post) are generally acknowledged as the first to decode all but a small fraction of this alphabet on the first day.
Since then, the final characters of the first alphabet have been found by various members in the fan community, and confirmed by the discovery of the hk_droid alphabet.
Known issues[]
Many of the in-game instances of this font, particularly on book titles, are missing the first characters of each word. This is almost certainly because the font file that was used to generate the textures, "hk_droid", had no uppercase characters. So when trying to display a title like "Weather", the text was displayed in Photoshop as "eather"... interpreted by some puzzled fans as a crude directive to "eat her"!
"(W)EATHER".
"Tricoteuse"
It appears that the level designers also had no real understanding of the alphabets, so would reuse text in strange places. Much of the translatable text in-game, for example, simply reuses the "Tricoteuce" (French for "knitter lady") sign for the knitting granny.
A regrettable amount of the text encoded with this alphabet merely uses variations on Latin Lorem Ipsum as meaningless "filler text". However, there may always be Latin references hidden within!
This alphabet (decoded by DewiMorgan) was the second to be decoded, though there remain four unknown characters (Q, X, Y, Z), and three unknown glyphs that are likely to match one of those characters.
Just like the Primary alphabet, the Secondary alphabet is a simple character replacement for English letters, with no differences made between upper or lower case. It does not seem to be directly based on any preexisting alphabets, though it takes inspiration from several.
Known issues[]
Glyphs for unknown secondary letters.
There are four letters which do not seem to appear in any meaningful text anywhere in the game or its files, so cannot easily be mapped to a letter. Three glyphs have been found, but all only in random "filler" text.
A regrettable amount of the text encoded with this alphabet is merely filler text, using obvious random keyboard-mashing, "ASDFGSDFG" style home-rowmashing. It is worth noting that the art creators used the French AZERTY keyboard layout: letter-frequency analysis of their random mashing, compared to random mashing on a QWERTY keyboard, may help in identifying the final few glyphs.
Some of the text encoded with this alphabet as filler text uses the advertising spiel from their homepage.
This alphabet has not been decoded, and letter-frequency-analysis suggests that may not be a real alphabet at all. This has been confirmed by the devs.
While there are far more than 26 glyphs, most glyphs appear in only one graphic in the game.
Those that appear multiple times usually only appear multiple times within the same image, as if an artist were reusing elements when writing fake writing.
The few glyphs that do appear multiple times are particularly recognizable (such as the upward-pointing triangle with a bar underneath it), so are likely to be reused elements used by artists trying to make similar-looking fake text.
Given that the artists have shown with the other fonts that they had little interest in encoding real text (as seen in their copious use of filler text), nor in getting the encoded text right when they did (as seen in the book titles with missing letters), it seems unlikely that they would carefully encode text in the work they did by hand.
If it is an encoded alphabet, it is a complex one, and no in-game "Rosetta stone" has yet been found.
The droids use both Arabic numbers (the digits 0 to 9), and another numbering system.
Each character represents a 3x3 grid. This system uses the number of dots in each character to represent the value of the number itself:
⠄ = 1
⠅ = 2
⠌⠄= 3
⠨⠅= 4
⠕⠅= 5
⠝⠅= 6
⠽⠅= 7
⠯⠇= 8
⠿⠇= 9
??? = 0 (doesn't exist, or it could be represented as nothing if it follows the logic of a 3x3 grid)
Known issues[]
Curiously, while there are multiple-digit numbers shown in-game, there are none with a character representing zero, nor with a space in the number (since that would seem to be the logical "zero" character, having zero dots). Keypads in-game which use this numbering system do not appear to have a character for zero.
B-12's Translations[]
The drone B-12 provides in-game translations for text, but so far as has been recorded, these have never once matched the actual text.
Development[]
It has been proposed that, given that Jon_AI wrote "the language evolved over time", the primary alphabet may be the most recent form of the alphabet, the secondary an earlier one, and the handwritten one the first.
However, the TTF font contained metadata stating that it was created by the Director Viv in 2017 using the FontStruct site, and was initially just called "hk_font". This was the year their studio BlueTwelve was founded, after two years of the two directors working on it alone, so this timeline seems unlikely.
The alphabets have very little in common, other than that the Primary's 'N' is the same as the Secondary alphabet's 'E'. So it seems likely that they were developed as three alphabets from the beginning.
Official word[]
Annapurna Interactive employee Jon_AI wrote in the Discord:
July 19 - Release day: "So the language evolved over time and assets were created at different parts of development yes, but it is still translate-able. One thing to note is SOMETIMES the script is used the way humans use alphabets like Japanese Kana today where it lacks meaning in it's true form but is used to signal a meaning in another adjacent language that has similar glyph shapes. A good example is the script behind the busker in the Slums but I'll leave it to you to understand what it means. I think probably you should investigate for a bit. I think the community will probably figure out a lot in the next few days but at some point we're happy to share additional details, just don't want to spoil ALL the fun of it 😂"
July 22: "We have all been watching your progress and the whole team is FLOORED by how much you all have found (including our mistakes thank you for catching our bugs and typos). We are not quite ready to reveal all the lore details yet as it's only the first week but you all are doing incredibly. After things have settled a little bit from the launch and it's a little less spoiler-y we'd love to share more and confirm/deny some of your hunches. Regarding names -- we do not have more canonical names for them. Regarding "writing-like" art -- yes generally this is the case but some of the things that you may not be able to translate may just be using the alphabets to write things that may be readable as English. The following attachment for example is actually a reference to one of the directors. That's all for now!"
Jon_AI's image showing pseudo-English.
Gallery[]
In the gallery below, find some deciphered messages. They can be compared with decipher-matrix.
