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As you may know, in July 2021 the Endangered Alphabets Project launched our Red List initiative. Our aim: to identify every script currently in use in the world find out which are healthy and which are in danger of extinction.

We’ve been working on the Red List for a little over 18 months, and we’ve discovered that the world has probably twice as many scripts as most people estimate — perhaps as many as 300.

We’ve also discovered:

• A new Indian script that was adopted by its community by winning a contest.
• An African script based on colors.
• A divinatory script that incorporates the pawprints of jackals.
• A script that maps the cosmos.
• Several West African scripts that involve symbols embroidered, printed or painted on fabrics.
• Three scripts whose creators are, or have been, in jail for acts of civil disobedience (such as making scripts for their community).At least four minority scripts that are being revived through calligraphy classes in schools or in markets.
• Two scripts that consist of geometrical patterns traced in sand.An Indian script that was banned 200 years ago, with mass book burnings, but in the late 20th century was the subject of what can only be called guerilla script revival through civil disobedience.
• An African king who did his graduate thesis at an American university on the script invented by his great-grandfather.
• More than one script whose scribes abstained from sex before embarking on acts of writing or copying.
• And, perhaps most remarkable of all, a sacred Indian script that is recited aloud while being written in chalk letters on a slate, then the slate is washed with turmeric water and the devotees drink it, thereby incorporating the divine letters and the spirits they represent.

We’ve discovered scripts that were created but never used, scripts that were used for centuries but then exterminated by mass book/manuscript burnings, successful scripts created by teenagers, scripts kept alive by a single person (in one case) or four families (in another), and scripts that are even now being targeted for linguistic genocide.

All of these riches, though, challenge our means of assessing whether a script is vital or threatened. To put it crudely, if the Latin alphabet is a 1 in terms of vitality and the Bamum script of Cameroon is a 9, how do we tell a 4 from a 5? The entire field of script loss is so poorly studied it presents a snowstorm of unanswered questions.

We don’t know what the critical mass of users is needed for a script to survive. (After all, if a script reduced to only four families can survive, where is the drop-off point?) We don’t know how much protection a religion offers. We don’t know how important a generational divide is. We don’t know whether a genocide (or, for that matter, even active repression) has a paradoxical rebound effect. We don’t know whether a script is more likely to be revitalized in the homeland or through the diaspora.

Then there’s the relationship between a script and its language. To what extent is script endangerment linked with language endangerment? Does the gradual loss of the language wear away at the script, or the other way round? Conversely, does language revitalization lead to script revitalization, or vice versa? And what about the potent paradox: the more besieged the culture, the stronger their potential sense of connection to their script as an emblem of their identity? We’re entering untrodden ground.

More broadly, though, many of our discoveries strain our conventional definitions of writing — and this is where I invite your feedback and suggestions.

The standard Western definition of writing is strictly based on phonetics: Unless it consists of symbols that correspond directly to sounds of speech, it isn’t writing. Yet this is very much based on if-they-don’t-do-it-like-us-they-don’t-count thinking. By this definition, Chinese is not, strictly speaking, writing, yet Confucius was writing philosophy when Britons were still painting themselves with woad. (The Romans referred to these ancient Britons as “Picts,” from the Celtic word for “painted.”) Should we include these graphic systems in the Red List?

And while we’re on the subject of skin coloring, should we include tattooing as a form of script? The Maori tattoo tradition called Tā moko can be used to express a wide range of meanings: mana/authority in Te Reo/Māori language, Harakeke/weaving, your contribution to your hapu/subtribe, or iwi/tribe.

We still suffer from a colonial-era tendency to dismiss forms of graphic communication that don’t use paper, but in fact, we might equally admire cultures for their skillful use of other available media: bamboo, buffalo horn, bark, wood, stone.

And the medium, of course, influences the form of symbols used to express it.

The Hmong are famous for their embroidered storytelling fabrics; the Adinkra and Ga Samai symbols of West Africa are traditionally printed rather than written on ceremonial robes, but they still convey personal qualities or proverbial wisdom all the same.

The Chokwe of Angola tell stories that they illustrate by tracing lines in sand with a fingertip, as do storytellers in Vanuatu. Do we deny that they are forms of writing because they are transitory, and the story will remain in the mind long after the story-pattern has washed or blown away?

Something has so far prevented me from including quipu, the Incan tradition of recording information by means of knotted strings — but perhaps I’m being too timid, or too conservative, and I should include quipu as well?

We humans are inventive creatures, and especially in areas unaffected (until recently) by printing, we have found almost limitless ways of conveying meaning, information, history, belief.

The Endangered Alphabets Project is dedicated to respecting those methods and those traditions, and defending them from the assumptions that involve the Latin alphabet, which is encroaching on virtually every part of the world more effectively than any Mongol, Roman, or British army. By which I mean it’s not just the Latin alphabet that is conquering the globe, but the assumptions about writing that it embodies and takes with it.

What do you suggest I do?

Tim Brookes, the founder of the non-profit Endangered Alphabets Project, can be contacted at tim@endangeredalphabets.com. The pioneering Red List work continues, funded entirely by individual donations. To support this work, click here.