click to enlarge - File: Bear Cieri
- Tim Brookes
The Balinese culture of Indonesia devotes one day each year to honoring Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of wisdom, learning and writing. On Saraswati Day, Balinese families dust off and repair their books, then display them in household shrines for veneration.
Tim Brookes, a longtime Vermont author, journalist, college professor and founder of the Burlington-based nonprofit Endangered Alphabets Project, described Saraswati Day in his soon-to-be-released book, Writing Beyond Writing: Lessons From Endangered Alphabets. When Brookes sent a draft of the book to David Crystal, one of the world's preeminent scholars on languages, Crystal wrote in the manuscript's margin that Brookes should invent a comparable holiday for Western society.
Thus was born the idea for World Endangered Writing Day, the first of which will be held on Tuesday, January 23. The free event, which Brookes organized, will feature presentations, discussions, games and an awards ceremony celebrating minority and Indigenous writing systems around the world. The festival, held entirely online, will include presenters from such far-flung locales as England, Scotland, Poland, Switzerland, India and Bangladesh. Mundolingua, a museum of language in Paris, will also live stream the event for its visitors. One presentation, on African scripts, will be held on Saturday, January 20.
As Brookes explained, the goal of the event is more than just celebratory. Of the world's 300 known writing systems, 90 percent are threatened with extinction because they're not officially used or recognized by governments, aren't taught in schools, or have been actively suppressed by their countries' dominant cultures.
Brookes had no formal education in anthropology, linguistics or foreign languages when, in 2013, he founded the Endangered Alphabets Project to preserve rare and endangered writing systems. In 2019 he launched an online Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, which has since been viewed by users in 183 countries. In 2021 Brookes unveiled a "red list" of scripts most at risk of extinction — comparable to the international red list of endangered species — which he hopes to finish by this summer. For World Endangered Writing Day, Brookes will unveil profiles of 100 endangered writing systems recently added to the atlas.
Among them are two scripts — Oromo and Walabu — that were created in the mid-20th century by and for ethnic minority groups in Ethiopia. Though reference books have often described these scripts as extinct, Brookes discovered that they've been kept alive and are still used within certain tribal groups in Africa.
Why did he dub the event World Endangered Writing Day and not World Endangered Alphabets Day? Brookes explained that when he first coined the phase "endangered alphabets" in 2009, he knew relatively little about writing systems — specifically, that they're not all considered alphabets. Many use ideograms, symbols that represent not just sounds but complex phrases or ideas. In fact, invading and colonial powers often viewed ideograms as childish and thus inferior to the Latin alphabet that they brought with them.
"We have the bully alphabet," Brookes said, referring to the one now ubiquitous worldwide. "That is not only a colonial view and, to some extent a racist view, but it's also incredibly limited and limiting in terms of what writing can be."
Currently, there are no college or university degree programs focused on endangered writing systems the way there are for endangered languages. In fact, Brookes pointed out, "The people most likely to study writing most thoroughly and perceptively are not linguists. They are type designers."
One of his many goals is that World Endangered Writing Day will change all that.