Hieroglyphics is a system of writing which uses logograms, rather than an alphabet, to record a language. Logograms are single characters which may represent an idea, a subject, or a word; several modern languages use logograms including Chinese and Japanese.d. In hieroglyphics, a large family of characters is used to represent a language. A hieroglyph can represent language in several ways. The most common is as an ideogram or pictogram, or a representation of a subject or idea. Many Chinese characters, for example, are ideograms.