The Red List: Our Three-Year Project to Map All the World’s Scripts

Dear Friends of the Endangered Alphabets:

I’m writing in the hope that you will support our next initiative, one that is not only our most ambitious to date but that will change the way the world sees writing, and writing systems, and the people—especially indigenous and minority people—who use them.

Here’s the situation. I’m sure you know of the Red List of Endangered Species, which not only determined which species were at risk but changed our whole way of thinking about the natural world. Likewise, the UNESCO catalogue of languages in danger launched innumerable initiatives in language documentation and revitalization.

But there is no Red List for endangered scripts. In fact, there is no list of all the scripts currently in use in the world—in other words, no way of even knowing what exists. There is no means of knowing which scripts are suffering the most attrition, or are most urgently at risk, and therefore no way to determine where and how to address this global crisis.

Because, without a doubt, it is a crisis. When a culture, almost always for reasons beyond its control, is forced to abandon its traditional form of writing, within two generations that culture’s entire written record, and in many respects its collective wisdom, its sense of unique identity, even in some cases its legal rights to exist—may be lost.

From the research conducted over the past decade by the Endangered Alphabets Project, it seems likely that the world currently uses a little more than 200 writing systems, of which fewer than 40 are genuinely thriving and healthy. In other words, more than 80% are at some degree of risk. We know of scripts that are used by fewer than a dozen people; we know of scripts that have been used over hundreds of years that can now be read only by a handful of researchers.

I believe it’s the job of the Endangered Alphabets Project to take on this crisis, but we can’t do it without your help.

If anyone is in a position to create this Red List, we are. We are the only organization that has been making this our principal focus for more than a decade. We have built up a database of contacts in the academic world and in minority communities all over the world–plus in many cases the actual creators of indigenous scripts themselves.

As I said, this will be a huge endeavor, our most ambitious to date. We need to do vast amounts of research, as many of these scripts have little or no internet footprint. Above all, we have no census data to draw on: as far as I know, there is no national census in the world that asks what alphabet people primarily read and write.

It’s a sign of how important this task is that some of the world’s leading experts on scripts, language, and digitization have offered to act as consultants. We’re already tackling the difficult questions: what makes a script endangered? What, indeed, is a script?

For our first year, which officially begins on October 1, I’m budgeting $63,500, of which we have already raised $7,000 from major donors and we are going after another $45,000 in grants and sponsorships. So I’m hoping you’ll help us raise $11,500 over the next two weeks. If each of you donate $10, we will make it.

What we’re asking from you is the chance to demonstrate that this hitherto unrecognized area is vital, is urgent, and needs to be accorded the degree of seriousness it deserves.

Please make your donation, which can be as a single gift or monthly payments, at https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/how-to-support-us/.

And you can follow the progress of this fundraiser at https://www.facebook.com/tim.brookes.92/.

Let’s put endangered alphabets on the map.

Thanks.

Tim

Tim Brookes
Founder and executive director
The Endangered Alphabets Project

P.S. As an extra incentive, I’m offering two of my favorite carvings as rewards. Both are based on the wonderful Mongolian calligraphy of O. Oyuntungalag. One says, “Believe in Yourself”; the other says “Thank You.” Couldn’t sum up this enterprise more succinctly, or express it more beautifully. The former will be a reward to anyone who donates $2,500, the latter for a donation of $1,500.