Abstract

Handwriting is a neuro-muscular phenomenon, which is affected by the author’s gender, age, ethnicity, the system of handwriting learned, content, purpose, writing protocol, whether written from memory, dictated, or copied out, writing instruments, changes in the handwriting of an individual over time, etc. It has been established by studies that handwriting is an acquired skill. Handwriting is also related to the cognitive aspects of the brain with the muscular movements. Therefore, it can be hypothesized that a certain degree of commonness exists in the handwriting features of the people of the same population group. Few researches had been conducted in this aspect to identify the ethnic origin of author through distinctive characteristics of their handwriting, which reflects their ethnic origin. Out of these works, a couple of studies took quantitative approach to statistically examine the characteristics of handwriting. This research will help in identifying the authors of anonymous writings. Also the work will help the anthropological researchers in identifying the ethnic origin of writer based on their ethno-linguistic handwriting features. We approach this problem using multilingual writers. We have focused on a very distinctive ethno-linguistic groups such as Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali and Hindi writers, to double check the results. Further comparison is done with the findings of the data obtained from control population. Each set of group contains 50 samples.

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