As recently as 2018, there was still no single source of information about the world’s endangered or emerging scripts. Many were entirely undocumented; others had entries that did not identify the script’s genesis, value of the script to its community, the reasons for its endangerment and the forces at work either to extinguish it or revive it. In that sense, such scripts were presented as linguistic or anthropological curiosities, a perspective that did little or nothing to help the world at large understand the causes of script loss, or to be able to support the communities in question.
The online Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, launched in January 2019, is an interactive encyclopedia of such scripts, groundbreaking at the time and updated ever since. It includes profiles of each script and its community, photographs of the script in use, and links to learn more about the script, or indeed to learn the script and its associated language.
Since its publication, the Atlas has become a vital world resource. It has been visited by people from 177 countries and has attracted more than a third of a million page views.
