That is, unless you dive into Tim Brookes’ new book, Writing Beyond Writing. The book resists easy taglines. It is an overview of scripts — a delightfully reader-friendly survey of how alphabets come to be — but also a manifesto of sorts that takes aim at the dominance of the Latin script and what its pervasiveness means in terms of colonialism and social inequity. It’s also a memoir of Brookes’ journey as a wood carver who finds renewed purpose through the use of endangered scripts. And perhaps most vitally, it is a clarion call to save the scripts used around the world by marginalized peoples.

Brookes is the creator of the Endangered Alphabets project, which seeks to document diminishing and overlooked scripts from around the globe. The project includes the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, an interactive website documenting endangered writing systems such as Walābū from Ethiopia, Kodava of Southern India, and Naasioi Otomaung from the Indonesian archipelago.

Notably, many of the scripts in the atlas are the traditional means of communication of indigenous people. In Writing Beyond Writing, Brookes crystallizes the idea that preserving indigenous scripts is essential to maintaining the identity and dignity of minority groups that already face economic, racial, and social oppression.

But why are indigenous scripts threatened? The culprit is often nationalism. “The first act of many a newly independent nation is to give the impression of unity and consolidation, and to avoid further fragmentation by repressing the independent spirit of regional or ethnic minorities,” writes Brookes. “Language rights, then, are human rights, and an endangered alphabet can be a sign that a people has been marginalized, suppressed, even slaughtered.”   

Perhaps the most surprising reveal in Writing Beyond Writing is that endangered scripts are not just the dusty vestiges of fast-disappearing cultures in need of immediate preservation, but that some groups are in the process of creating new scripts as a means of establishing cultural autonomy. Take the drama of the Adlam script, the writing system used by the people of Guinea. Created by two brothers — Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry — over the past few decades, the script is now taught in Africa, Europe, and the United States. Adlam was created as a means of delineating cultural heritage. Brookes writes, “One of the strongest incentives to create a script is to assert one’s own identity and autonomy in the face of those who would deny them.”

Not much escapes the wide-ranging scope of the book, as even emojis are offered up as a recent alphabet. Brookes is radically egalitarian when it comes to assessing pictorial versus character-driven scripts — say Egyptian hieroglyphics versus the Cyrillic alphabet. He writes movingly about the way in which Western notions of progress and advancement may have tenets of racist, colonial ideologies, and how Western assumptions about language — benign though they may seem — negatively impact indigenous writing systems. “Our collective goal is to leave the past behind, to grow out of it in a continuous process of modernization and improvement,” he writes. “[But] script itself is a reminder of heritage, identity, the right to exist in the face of threat from and erosion by more powerful neighbors.”

It is in the quieter moments of Writing Beyond Writing that we get up close and personal with the way in which these scripts are not just cultural artifacts, but living, breathing expressions of how distinct groups of people think. As a wood carver, Brookes’ interest in writing systems came about when carving some slabs of hardwood with Chinese symbols as gifts for his children. Brookes gives us a tour of his own tactile relationship with scripts through stories of his attempts to carve the shapes. “I want my carvings to look written, or even, in some cases, drawn,” he writes. “If possible, I want them to look beautiful, as though they were written with love and care, by a person.” Brookes makes the case that writing in these scripts is nothing short of an extension of “the human hand and the human mind.”

Truth be told, reading Writing Beyond Writing may result in a minor existential crisis. After all, Brookes points out that the Latin alphabet spread so widely in part because it is a very print-friendly medium. The shapes of the letters are uniquely suited to the printing press and mass production. The alphabet we use every day is a tool of the industrial revolution as much as it is a byproduct of colonial dispossession of native peoples around the world. It’s hard to read Brookes’ book without ruminating on one’s own role in perpetuating the universalization of one alphabet over a diverse array of unique and fascinating scripts.