Linguapax
Endangered Alphabets, by Tim Brookes
The world has between 6,000 and 7,000 languages, half of which may be extinct by the end of this century. Another and even more dramatic way in which this cultural diversity is shrinking concerns the scripts in which those languages are written. Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000-7,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 writing systems. Moreover, at least a third of the world's remaining alphabets are endangered-no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, understood only by a few elders, restricted to a few monasteries or used only in ceremonial documents, magic spells, or secret love letters. The Endangered Alphabets Project, an exhibition of carvings and a book, is one of the first attempts to illustrate and examine this issue. Endangered Alphabets, written for the non-specialist, acts as an explanatory text for the exhibition but goes farther to ask questions about writing itself: how it developed, how it spread across the globe, how the same alphabet took on radically different forms, like Darwin's finches, on neighboring islands, and how developments in technology affected writing, and vice versa. With 16 pages of photographs.
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