The Red List will be the legacy project of the Endangered Alphabets: it will lay the groundwork for the creation of an entire field and discipline of endangered script studies and endangered script revitalization.
Just as one of the most important acts in the history of environmental conservation was to create a Red List of endangered species, we are working to create a Red List of threatened writing systems, a database that identifies every script currently in use anywhere in the world, along with an assessment of the degree of health or endangerment of each one.
At the moment, there is no such list — in other words, no way of even knowing what Indigenous and minority writing systems exist. There are no good estimates of the number of users of each script. 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.
In our first year, we have already assembled a team, many of them volunteers, with skills in research, languages/scripts, and data visualization, along with consultants who have already worked on endangered language research and policy, and to create a database of the world’s extant writing systems and to establish criteria for their health and usage.
In the process, we shall create a kind of meta-database of resources, mostly online resources, for learning about each script and its culture of origin, and accessing teaching/learning materials, so as to pave the way for future revitalization work by ourselves and others.
