World Endangered Writing Day promotes preservation of rare alphabets on January 23, 2024

BURLINGTON, Vt. - EntSun -- The second-annual World Endangered Writing Day on January 23, 2025, will bring together academics, researchers, calligraphers, typographers, and graphic designers with members of indigenous communities to celebrate and preserve endangered writing systems.

The online event includes a full day of talks, discussions, activities, awards, and games in support of the world's minority and indigenous scripts and their communities. Registration is free and open to the public at EndangeredWriting.world.

Though there are some 7,000 recognized languages worldwide, there are only about 300 writing systems—and 90 percent of them are no longer used for official purposes or taught in schools. Many are actively suppressed by a dominant culture or government, says Tim Brookes, founder of World Endangered Writing Day and its parent organization, the Endangered Alphabets Project. "History is written by the winners—in the winner's alphabet," he explains.

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The number of people who can read, write, and understand the cultural context of the these endangered scripts dwindles every year, Brookes says. "Unfortunately, there are no degree programs in writing systems or script loss. There are no government agencies dedicated to addressing the issue. No funding available for research or revival. We're aiming to change that with World Endangered Writing Day."

Because it's the dominant writing system worldwide—standardized, digitized, and used to represent English and over 150 other languages—Westerners tend to think of our ubiquitous Latin alphabet in strictly utilitarian terms. However, in many other cultures both the manual act of writing, and the written word itself, is seen as an artistic, even divine, form of expression, commemoration, or even worship.

"Many of these endangered writing systems are imbued with layers of meaning far beyond what we in the digital, keyboard-oriented world are accustomed to," says Brookes. "A script is often as much a representation of a culture as its music or dance forms. The loss of this cultural context is as tragic as the loss of access to the meaning of the words."

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Indigenous scripts also reflect their material and environmental contexts. "They embody and display the physical act of writing with the human hand, using a specific tool, on a particular surface," explains Brookes. For example, the runic alphabet used by ancient Germanic tribes was typically carved into stone monuments, so it's a rigid, entirely linear alphabet. In contrast, Mongolian calligraphy, executed with brush on paper, is a flowing, curvaceous script.

To register and learn more, visit https://www.EndangeredWriting.world.

Inaugural 2024 WEWD Keynote featuring Tim Brookes and Maung Ting Nyeu:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/UaDltYvzeH4?si=fj... (http://www.endangeredwriting.world)