Endangered Alphabets

Abstract

The Endangered Alphabets Project is a series of carvings, a book and a continuing blog, all of which address the fact that the world has fewer than 100 writing systems and roughly a third of them 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. For Charting Vanishing Voices, Tim Brookes will display a dozen carvings, each of which displays the word ‘words’ in an endangered writing system.