In reality, the glyphs are a cipher of Japanese. Each glyph is a stylized version of a letter from the Latin alphabet. A word written in Japanese phonology can be converted to Barian by converting the word to romaji and then replacing each letter with its corresponding Barian glyph. As the letters "c", "j", "l", "q", "v" and "x" are not used in standard Japanese romanizations, they do not have Barian glyphs.