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. […]
Not exactly an endangered alphabet, but certainly a confused letter. Or two. A guest blog by Hans de Wolf. Do you know that there is a well-educated civilized country in north-western part Europe, with a very high literacy rate, of which the language is spoken by about 23 million people – but were there is […]
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 […]
Donated: $7290 Still needed: $2710 Time left: 4 hours……. What’s the Endangered Alphabets up to? We’re going back to the big-picture thinking that no other organization in the world is doing: we’re in the middle of our Red List campaign to track down every script currently in use in the world and assess just […]
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 […]
In my past life as a film reviewer, people sent me movies all the time for review; thirty years later, it was a surprise and a pleasure to be sent The Volunteer Archivists by Subhashish Panigrahi, the film’s cameraperson, sound recordist, director and producer and a longtime advocate for open-source media about cultural and linguistic […]
Great news: we reached our goal with 24 hours to spare! A thousand thanks to everyone who helped us. If we go more than $1,000 over our goal–in other words, if we reach $18,500 by noon EST tomorrow, Friday–I’ll do an audiobook edition (there are those who see me as the David Attenborough of the […]
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 […]
We’re under way, and it’s time to dive in. The campaign to fund the publication of my new book, Writing Beyond Writing: Voyages Among Endangered Alphabets, is off and running, and, based on a suggestion from one of you, I’ve already added a new reward–the ebook edition, for those of you who like reading in […]
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 […]
