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 […]
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 […]
I’m looking for high-quality photos of pieces of writing in endangered alphabets to include in my upcoming book, Writing Beyond Writing: Voyages Among Endangered Alphabets. The three best submissions will each win $100, and will be published in the book along with credit for the photographer. Rules: The photo must be high resolution, at least […]
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 […]
It’s true–we now have a Patreon! Come behind the scenes of the Endangered Alphabets Project and see how we create artwork and games to help save some of the world’s most endangered forms of writing and the cultures that depend on them. Four levels of engagement start at $5 per month. All of them offer […]
Here’s my best brief explanation of why we’ve chosen the Bamum script as the subject for our very first spring fundraiser. Upload limits meant there’s one important element you don’t hear about–namely, that saving endangered alphabets isn’t simply a linguistic exercise involving unfamiliar letters. Saving a script is part of saving a culture, especially on […]
