It is remarkable how many of the roughly 300 scripts in use around the world have been created in response to dreams—at least 20. In some instances the dream involved a divine command to create a script for the dreamer’s community; in some cases it included actual shapes to be used as letters; in some […]
I’ve been studying and trying to promote indigenous and minority writing systems for 15 years, and yet when I say “Endangered Alphabets” most people just look blank and confused. There is little interest in or funding for the study of writing systems, and even less for writing endangerment. Most colleges and universities don’t teach about […]
There is very little recognition, let alone praise, for people who are working to revive their traditional or emerging scripts. An endangered or emerging alphabet is almost always a symptom of a marginalized or suppressed community—a group of people who are routinely dismissed or discriminated against by their neighbors and, often, by the regional or […]
As part of our World Endangered Writing Day 2025 celebration of calligraphy in minority scripts, we’ve compiled–well, Alana Brown did most of the work–this set of recommendations, mostly on Instagram, where you can see some of the rich profusion of the work being done to sustain minority writing through art. Reminder: you can register […]
On Monday morning (that is, September 9), I had an adventure beyond a geek’s wildest dreams. In Cambridge for a couple of weeks to do endangered alphabets research, I went to the Cambridge University Library and, casting around for somewhere to start, I asked Frank in the Manuscripts Reading Room for a couple of books […]
Nowadays, we think of writing as something that appears on paper, or a screen (or a billboard), and something we read/consume individually, but this is a very recent idea. Venture back a few centuries, or out among the endangered alphabets, and writing is part of a performance–such a fascinating difference that it’s the subject of […]
A surprising (to me) number of people still wonder why someone would go to all the trouble of inventing a new script for their language when, as they see it, the world seems to have enough perfectly good ones going around. Let’s hear the answer, or some of the answers, from the source. A guest […]
I’m planning my usual annual Kickstarter campaign in October, but in the meantime a cause has come to my attention that I want to support, if at all possible, with a mini- campaign right now. A couple of months ago I ran a global contest for handwriting in a minority or indigenous script, and one […]
At #EndangeredAlphabets I’ve been in the habit of telling anyone who will listen that Nüshu is, or was, the only script to have been invented and used solely by women, but as usual, life is more interesting, and I have been giving out false information. There have in fact been, in one sense or another, at […]
Right now I ought to be spending every waking moment promoting our Kickstarter campaign , just as you should be spending every moment backing it, but I can’t help taking time out to promote one of the most remarkable books of poetry I’ve ever seen: Bamboo Whispers, an anthology of Mangyan poetry from the island […]
