The World Endangered Writing Day 2026 Phonemoji Contest; or, How Do You Write a Raspberry?

The background

When the trailblazing Australian anthropologist Piers Kelly, the Indiana Jones of the minority writing system, began researching one of the many written forms of the Hmong languages of southeast Asia, he discovered something unusual and fascinating. Yes, as you’d expect, their writing mostly consisted of symbols we’d call “characters” or “glyphs” or “letters”–but some were different.

Some represented vocal utterances that are certainly spoken, and have a strong sense of meaning, but are not exactly what we would call words. One, for example, represents the vocalization made when calling chickens. A familiar spoken sound, represented by a single symbol. Brilliant.

The deep insight

When you slow down and think about it, our own speech is full of sounds that have no exact or defined letter-equivalent. What about a raspberry, also known in the U.S. as a Bronx cheer? Probably everyone who has ever lived has uttered a raspberry at some point, and its meaning was generally understood and instantly clear—but how would you write it?

Some have a kind of onomatopoeic spelling that is clear but clumsy, requiring multiple characters to write out. When we tut-tut, for example, we have to write out “tut-tut.” Ditto an atishoo sneeze.

Other vocalizations can be written out using standard letters, but such spellings give no sense of inflection of true/intended meaning. If I’m writing dialogue, for example, and someone says “Hmmm,” it’s hard to know out of context how those letters should be pronounced, or what exactly they imply in terms of the speaker’s intention.

Even more common, and even more ambiguous—a cough. As human animals, we have dozens of coughs, ranging from the involuntary to the meaningful. We could theoretically have an entire range of symbols that convey both the sound of the utterance and its intended meaning. We might invent such a symbol-family.

We could call them phonemoji—symbols that, rather than conveying an idea or a feeling or a state of mind, like usual emoji, instead convey actual specific spoken vocalizations, like the raspberry, the tut, the cluck of disapproval, the yawn, the faux spit, or the rubbery noise we make when we blow air out between our lips in exasperation.

And let’s face it, over the centuries many, many scripts have added characters to fill an expressive gap. Some survive as what we call punctuation.

The analogy

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant to see a range of ways in which a range of vocal sounds have been represented (in some instances rather confusingly, if you ask me) with typographic symbols. You can do better. You are not limited to the keyboard.

The contest

Your challenge is to think of a common vocalization that until now has been written out awkwardly using a best-guess phoneticized cluster of letters (such as the harrumph) and coin/design a single character that represents it.

You can respond in your own language rather than the Latin alphabet is you choose, but whatever script you use, your invention, obviously, shouldn’t be easily mistaken for another pre-existing letter or character.

You can send in just one, or if you get on a roll and start to see what a vast landscape of opportunities lies ahead of you, you can coin several.

You can choose to limit yourself to printer black or incorporate colours if they help your cause.

You can create symbols that resemble something found in nature if you like, but again you want to make sure your invention can’t be mistaken for a standard emoji.

Ideally, your symbol(s) should be instantly recognizable but easy to write/draw. The splat at the head of this set of instructions (which I think of as a pretty good way to phonemoji a raspberry, and you could even do it in raspberry-red) is a great example, because you don’t have to draw every splat exactly the same for people to know what you mean.

The encouragement

I ran a workshop at the Barbican Centre in London last October somewhat along these lines, and some of the entries were fabulous. No experience necessary. It’s just a question of looking at things from a different direction. One workshop participant brilliantly represented a common sound-cluster used in Mexican Spanish with a simplified axolotl–which, as it happens, is used in Mexico City as a symbol of resistance.

The prizes

The best three entries (judged in my customary subjective fashion) will win a copy of the digital edition EITHER of my book Writing Beyond Writing (and after all, what are phonemoji if not writing beyond the usual limitations of writing?) or my book By Hand.

The deadline, the submission

Send to tim@endangeredalphabets.com by midnight Cambridge (UK) time on February 1, 2026.

Have fun! Be creative! Splat to your heart’s content!