By: Tim Brookes
It’s a widely-quoted estimate that half of the world’s 7,000-odd languages are endangered, and may be extinct by the end of this century.
It’s less widely quoted—in fact, this is may be the first time you’re hearing it—that 90% of the world’s 300-plus alphabets are likewise threatened.
In fact, most reference sources won’t even estimate how many writing systems are currently in use in the world, and none at all will identify the most threatened, the ones that are unofficial, not taught in schools, or outright suppressed.
Most scholars limit the science of linguistics to the study of spoken languages, and, worst of all, there’s a prevailing belief in academic circles that the fewer people use a specific alphabet, the less important it is.
Let me restate that: the fewer people use a spoken language, the more it is described – quite rightly – as threatened or endangered.
Yet the fewer people use a culture’s unique script, the more likely it is to be ignored, to remain unstudied, to be allowed to wither on the vine as the Latin alphabet, already used by more people than all other scripts combined, takes over the world.
If we back up in history to, say, the early 1960s, that was pretty much the general view of species: if an animal became extinct, it was probably because of its own stupidity. The dodo, one of the first species to have its extinction recorded by humans, became, in a blame-the-victim way, a symbol of the lack of survival of the unfittest: it was too stupid not to run away, we were told, so if it died out, it was its own fault.
It was only with the publication of the Red List of Threatened Species in 1964 that the notion of endangerment gained currency – and with it, the hitherto unasked questions of what caused the endangerment, and what could be done about it.
Likewise, until the 1990s it was generally believed in scholarly circles (except in Australia) that spoken languages were subject to a kind of linguistic natural selection, and some were bound to just die out. Again, it took a bold new perspective to assert that minority languages might actually be able to teach us something about language itself, and, somewhat later, that languages are a crucial part of culture, and thus to save a language is a human rights issue.
Yet nobody has yet managed to put endangered alphabets on the map, even though, heave knows, I’ve spent the last dozen years, since I founded the Endangered Alphabets Project, trying.
Which leads us to the inauguration of World Endangered Writing Day: January 23rd, 2024.
World Endangered Writing Day was born when I read in my research that in traditional Balinese culture, one day a year was dedicated to respecting and venerating writing.
Balinese Om Shanti
On the day dedicated to the goddess Saraswati, nothing written may be destroyed, or even a letter crossed out. All the lontar manuscripts – oblong pages of lontar palm leaf, written on with a stylus and then bound between wooden slats – in a household are gathered and act as the representation of the goddess, to whom eighteen offerings are made, one for each of the letters of the Balinese alphabet. Each offering contains the symbol of the supreme god, made of fried rice dough.
This may sound like superstition, but to me it shows a deep understanding of the value and importance of writing, especially one’s own writing, the writing that connects us to our ancestors, and our deities. As Abraham Lincoln wrote, “The written word may be man’s greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.” Yet while old Balinese books end up on household altars, our old books end up on remainder tables or at yard sales. The dead and the absent become a little deader, a little more absent.
World Endangered Writing Day, then, is an observance of writing in all its varied and astonishing manifestations, as an extraordinarily expressive range of cultural artifacts and cultural practices.
Just as each individual person’s handwriting is an expression of their character, their educational tradition, even their mood, each culture’s form of writing is self-expressive. Every script is shaped over time by the people who use it, and is as much an expression of their culture as their music, art, or dance.
For example: we know of one or more scripts…
- whose every letter has a secret mystical meaning;
- that united entire minority communities against colonizers;
- that are essentially cosmic maps;
- that are taken so seriously that a scribe must recite specific mantras before beginning to write, before making a correction, even before opening a book;
- that were created as the result of dreams, visions, or divine commands;
- that were devised and used solely by women, largely in secret;
- that were so banned that a writer who used them could be imprisoned and have all his property confiscated;
- that were written or incised in bark, palm leaves, bamboo, buffalo horn, animal hide, stone, wood, and even human skin, as tattoos. The very shapes of their letters were influenced by the tools and materials available, and so reflect not only their history but their landscape;
- that have such spiritual significance that if someone in the community dies without having learned to read and write their script, the priest sits beside the corpse in the period before cremation and teaches in the alphabet so it is prepared for the afterlife.
Manchu script
This is the purpose of Endangered Writing Day: to move beyond the assumption that it would be more convenient if everyone used the Latin alphabet and to learn just how much richer and more interesting writing can be in the very cultures where it is most threatened. And beyond that, to realize that to respect a culture is to respect its language, spoken and/or written.
What will that look like? Here’s an example.
One of the Endangered Writing Day speakers is Kajama Chakma, a graduate student at the wonderful graduate program in Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading in the U.K.
She is an ethnic Chakma, a people traditionally from Bangladesh and India with their own language and traditions – and their own script, which is not recognized officially in either country nor taught in government-funded schools.
Her ambition is to help bring about a cultural revival for her people, and to do so by helping to revive their script. And to revive their script by creating a new digital Chakma font, a process she takes so seriously that she has already spent the best part of a year researching and rediscovering her marginalized culture, its writing traditions, its collective aesthetic, its way of understanding and transacting with the world.
Only then will she feel confident she can create a font that does not look artificial or alien or mechanical, but – Chakma.
Tim Brookes is the author of Writing Beyond Writing (https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/writing-beyond-writing/) and the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project.
REGISTRATION
World Endangered Writing Day, January 23rd 2024, will feature a day-long series of talks, discussions, short videos, interactive activities, book giveaways, an award ceremony, and even a game and a quiz, live-streamed on the Endangered Alphabets YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCsKW7O5nNNUyqhf0Jphubw.
For more information, contact admin@endangeredalphabets.com.
World Endangered Writing Day Schedule
All times EST. Major events will run 30-45 minutes, with shorter live and video events between.
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
8:30
A rare case study. Almost the only academic who is researching and teaching minority scripts is Samar Sinha, Coordinator, Center for Endangered Languages, Sikkim University (India) and Principal Investigator for Sikkim’s Endangered Language Documentation Project. And the state of Sikkim has more official scripts than any other government region in the world. What does the West, which knows only one script, have to learn from Sikkim?
9:30
What Is writing? The Sign and Symbol Research Group and Olgierd Uziemblo of the University of Warsaw consider how Western definitions of writing exclude many of the world’s most endangered and most visually interesting symbol systems.
10:30
What can extinct scripts teach us about script extinction–and script revival? Recent research on writing in the ancient world gives some unique perspectives on problems of language and writing endangerment, with important lessons for threatened cultural traditions in the modern day. A conversation with Pippa Steele, the VIEWS Project, (LINK) Cambridge University.
11:30
Awards Ceremony
Announcing the names of those whose work in reviving their traditional or emerging scripts we would like to celebrate and promote.
12:00
Second Wave launch
The switch is thrown, and 100 new scripts appear in the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, doubling our coverage of the world’s indigenous and minority writing systems. And with them, a puzzle and a chance to win a remarkable prize.
12:15
Learning to write. The people who study writing most thoroughly and perceptively are not linguists—they are type designers. Kajama Chakma, a graduate student in the world-renowned typography graduate program at the University of Reading (UK), explains why she is studying Chakma history, geography and aesthetics in order to create a new and culturally-authentic Chakma font.
1:00
Writing beyond the alphabet. Sabine Hyland of the University of St Andrews (UK) explores the textile media that expands our concept of writing: khipus of the Andes. How did these knotted and colored cords record bureaucratic data, such as population censuses and labor tribute, during the Inca Empire? How have khipus continued to be used in remote corners of the Andes? Hyland, an anthropologist who has worked in villages with living khipu traditions, explores these questions and more.
2:00
Teaching an endangered script through MOOC
Jue Wang Szilas from the University of Geneva presents her work in developing a multilingual MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on China’s endangered Naxi Dongba pictographic script. Her talk will center on the pedagogical design of the MOOC, preliminary results, and the participants’ feedback from its first run in 2023.
3:00
KEYNOTE
Maung Nyeu: Language, script and education revitalization in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. How do you create a mother-tongue education program when there are no trained teachers, no published teaching materials, the community speaks multiple languages—and the region is militarized?
4:00
The digital future
Anshuman Pandey and Deborah Anderson of the Script Encoding Initiative discuss the very current question “Does digitizing minority scripts, so they can be used on electronic devices, help to save them? What is the process, and what are the challenges?”
5:00
The last word
Tim Brookes discusses the past and future of writing with Amalia Gnandesikan, the author of The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet. Our summing up of the day’s discussions will ask the question, given what we know of writing in the past, what can we tell about writing in the future?
Short videos and book giveaways will be streamed in the intervals between these talks.
