This Is What We Are All About

This will be my next carving….

…because it expresses so perfectly what the Endangered Alphabets is all about. Sent to me by the Australian linguist Stephen Morey, who does groundbreaking work with minority cultures in northeast India, it is part of a song, sung by the Tai Phake people, a tiny community of about 250 families living in Assam.

It goes, “If our books and writing slowly disappear, then we will regret it.”

This is why the Endangered Alphabets are so important and yet so hard to explain–because we ourselves will never be in that position. The loss of our books and writing is utterly inconceivable. And in fact there is virtually no scholarship that even investigates what a catastrophic impact it has on a community to lose their script.

In our Red List initiative, the only effort of its kind in the world, we are trying to find every community, even as small and remote as the Tai Phake, that has its own script, and to document it. That’s why it will take us three years. We can’t afford to miss anyone.

Common estimates of the number of scripts in use in the world tend to be around 50-100. We have found nearly 300. Tiny, marginalized communities such as the Tai Phake have little or no internet footprint, and (with the exception of scholars such as Stephen Morey!) they tend to be ignored by Western scholars.

Please support our work at https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/how-to-support-us/

Please help; please invite others you know to join you in supporting this unique and literally far-reaching work.

Thanks.

Tim

P.S. To see where the campaign stands at any time before our March 1 deadline, go HERE.