T
he idea that minority scripts might be digitized, which was on almost nobody’s radar 10 years ago when I attended my first LocWorld conference, is now commonplace — not only in the language services space, but also in the digital type design and even academic spaces. This is generally a good thing. Allowing members of a minority community to publish learning materials, enhance literacy, and communicate through digital devices — as well as to enable scholars to write about, refer to, and quote from documents in the script — are all laudable aims.
It’s easy, though, to misunderstand the diverse nature of writing itself and assume — wrongly and with possibly disastrous results — that script digitization is always a means of liberation and access. This assumption can cause well-meaning people to rush to create digital fonts for every writing system on Earth.
Those of us who only or primarily use the Latin alphabet, which is so widely used and so utilitarian that it is like linguistic duct tape, can hardly imagine a script that is used by only one community — even less a script that is used by only one community for one specific purpose. Likewise, it’s hard for us to imagine what it would be like if that script were to be transformed, over just a few years, into something that can be used by everyone — even outsiders — for any purpose.
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So, let’s look at a few examples in which script digitization would be unhelpful or even harmful.
First, many minority communities around the world are forced to live in inaccessible locations that do not have reliable electricity, let alone internet signal. Even though more and more scripts are being adapted for use on cell phones, and cell phone adoption is expanding worldwide, there are still places (especially in West Africa) where blackboard and chalk may well be the appropriate technology, at least for now.
Moreover, minority communities often have more urgent priorities than digitizing their script. I was recently involved in a conversation between an educational app developer and a minority community in the Philippines in which the community representatives said their top priorities right now are land rights and community development. It’s hard to get excited about traditional script preservation when your people are losing their homes.
Additionally, at least a dozen endangered scripts are considered sacred — that is, not only are sacred texts written in them, but the act of writing in them is itself sacred. To digitize such scripts is to secularize them, to remove the awe and respect they are traditionally accorded. Pretty soon you’ll see those characters, previously used only in rituals and ceremonies, slapped together in pastiche to form a Starbucks logo, as has happened in Lijiang, China.
I’m speaking about the Dongba script, which illustrates another danger. Shamanic scripts such as Dongba are traditionally used only by practitioners, who teach them only to their disciples, and sometimes only a single disciple. To digitize them would be to remove them from this process of select transmission. Because each shaman practices and teaches his own version of the script, there is such variety that what is nominally the same script may have dozens of characters with the same meaning. You can’t standardize that without sacrificing the entire shaman-mentor relationship.
Yet other scripts have three-dimensional, material forms, such as the bògòlanfini or “mud cloth” traditions of West Africa. Traditional bògòlanfini production is a labor-intensive process in which weavers, mainly men, produce narrow strips of fabric that are pieced together by women in a variety of sizes and styles for dyeing. The first round involves soaking in a dye bath made from milled or ground leaves, which turn the fabric yellow. The designs are then painted, using mud that has been carefully collected and fermented for up to a year, and — thanks to a chemical reaction between the mud and the leaf dye — remain even after the mud has been washed off.
Many of the traditional symbols and motifs found in bògòlanfini could be digitized, but to extract them and make them screen-ready would destroy the creation process and the deep relationship between the characters and, literally, the soil. Making the glyphs available for download would make them more available for, say, graphic designers, but that in turn may render traditional skills obsolete, then forgotten, then lost.
Finally, some scripts are used exclusively in artistic performances. One example is the Lota Ende script from the island of Flores in Indonesia, which is used to write mourning narrative poems, called woi, for circumcision rituals. When a boy is to be circumcised, the family asks a specialist to write down the boy’s biography and family situation in the form of a woi. During the ceremony, the woi is recited in such a sad tone that those who listen to it may cry. In fact, more than one family may attend, with more than one woi recited, and listeners may evaluate which woi and reader are the best — a matter of considerable prestige for the family and the boy.
Another example is a battle of poetic riddles from Kenya involving Gīcandī — a word that refers to the script, tradition, poetry, and musical instrument that is used. According to the Gīkūyū Centre for Cultural Studies, “the Gīcandī is an ancient composition of enigmatic poetry presented in public by two poets in a dialogue of back and forth battle of wits. Composed of reportedly over 150 stanzas, the singer of the Gīcandī had to learn [the high number of enigmas] by heart … One of the contestants would propose an enigma first, and the other would explain it and propose the next in turn. The competition would go on until one of the two failed to give the interpretation and so lost the game. The losing party handed over his musical instrument to the winner.”
The musical instrument in question is a gourd containing seeds and pebbles, with cowrie shells attached, and extensively inscribed with ideograms. Kimani Njogu, a modern student of the Gīcandī, explains in a YouTube video that there is no distinction between the ideograms and the performance itself. “The performer considers the inscribed text an integral part of his performance and thus would make constant reference to them in the poem. In most Gīcandī performances, the inscribed text, the gourd itself, and the poet’s composition dialogically merge indistinguishably.”
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The fact that those of us who speak major world languages are accustomed to seeing the dialogue of a play in book form, or to reading the published lyrics of a song, encourages us to believe that words are somehow independent of the people who create them. In reality, it’s the people and context involved that gives writing meaning.
The danger of wall-to-wall digitization is that it is based on our belief that the way we use writing, and in fact our very understanding of writing, is right and superior. In digitizing the scripts of communities that use and understand writing differently, we may even believe we are doing them a favor. But when we take writing out of its manual context and convert it into digital form, we may simply not understand what it means in its original context to the people who use it. The fact that we in the privileged world have made that transition (or are making it) only makes us more eager for others to follow our lead, and less able to see the changes it makes even in our own societies.
Tim Brookes is the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project, which aims to create a list of the world’s writing systems, identifying every script currently in use and assessing its degree of health or vulnerability.
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