As I’m sure you can imagine, I spend much of my time (and my amazing volunteers spend much of their time) looking for scripts that have little or no Internet footprint, that may or may not still exist, that may be symptoms of marginalized or even oppressed cultures, forced to live out on the fringes, […]
In another blog post, I have written about four people who were killed for having created writing systems for their people. We know of others, though, who have been persecuted for their work and, though not actually assassinated, died as a result of that persecution. One is Sultan Ibrahim Njoya; another is Sheikh Bakri Sapalo. […]
This column aims to celebrate and draw attention to people doing original calligraphy and type design in their traditional minority script. In most cases, this act of revitalization is taking place in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Indonesia or Africa, as these are the regions with the greatest number of minority scripts. Today, though, we’re celebrating […]
Switching between languages? Hard enough. How about switching between scripts? Even after working on the Endangered Alphabets for 12 years, I’m still just starting to understand how Eurocentric and provincial my own thinking, like that of most of us in the West, has been, and continues to be. Despite all my work in scores of […]
This is a facsimile of the title page of a book, but you can think of it also as being like the map in a tale of lost cities, not so much the Lost City of Z as the Lost Alphabet of N. Initially noticed by Marcia Tiede, a librarian at Northwestern, and forwarded to […]
Few things make my work more delightful than the discovery of a new individual or group working on reviving their culture through its alphabet, or the discovery of an entirely new (to me) script. What better, then, than an email out of the blue that offers both? The script has three qualities that are found […]
Spoken languages can die. When the last speaker passes on, unless extensive recordings have been made, not only the vocabulary but the tones, the emphases, the rhythms and the syntax, the internal cohesion and structure of the language, can be impossible to reconstruct. Written languages bare different. The linkages between sound and symbol may be […]
As some of you know, I’ve launched the Red List initiative—the effort by the Endangered Alphabets Project to identify every script in current use and assess to what degree each one is thriving or threatened. Much of what we’re finding is highly-focused and local—fascinating scripts we never knew existed. But we’re also making some even more […]
Here at the Endangered Alphabets Project we are always glad to hear news of new font developments in indigenous/minority scripts, and the latest such news concerns a collaboration between Typotheque and indigenous communities in Canada. The Syllabics Project (see the mini-documentary here) involves launching a series of Unified Canadian Syllabics fonts that support Indigenous language […]
If you’ve been following this blog or reading the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, you’ll be well aware of the Adinkra symbols of Ghana. Nearby, though, there is another and much less well-known set of symbols. Darius Adjong has been researching them for a guest column for the Endangered Alphabets. He writes: Like the Adinkra symbols […]
