An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets

A global exploration of the many writing systems that are on the verge of vanishing, and the stories and cultures they carry with them.

If something is important, we write it down. Yet 85% of the world's writing systems are on the verge of vanishing - not granted official status, not taught in schools, discouraged and dismissed.

When a culture is forced to abandon its traditional script, everything it has written for hundreds of years - sacred texts, poems, personal correspondence, legal documents, the collective experience, wisdom and identity of a people - is lost.

This Atlas is about those writing systems, and the people who are trying to save them. From the ancient holy alphabets of the Middle East, now used only by tiny sects, to newly created African alphabets designed to keep cultural traditions alive in the twenty-first century: from a Sudanese script based on the ownership marks traditionally branded into camels, to a secret system used in one corner of China exclusively by women to record the songs and stories of their inner selves: this unique book profiles dozens of scripts and the cultures they encapsulate, offering glimpses of worlds unknown to us - and ways of saving them from vanishing entirely.

This impressive volume, organised geographically, sets out information on 80 writing systems in danger of being lost or replaced by majority scripts like Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic or Devanagari. It includes history and current state of each one, samples of use, and pointers to sources of further information. It is an invaluable guide for anyone interested in this aspect of threatened cultures around the world. -- Peter Austin, Emeritus Professor, SOAS University of London

Tim Brookes is universally regarded as the pioneer and authority in the field of script loss and revitalization on a global scale. Tim's hand-carvings of endangered scripts have been exhibited at over 150 leading universities, galleries and libraries. He is a frequent speaker on the importance of minority scripts at institutions including the Bodleian Library, the Smithsonian Institute and the Library of Congress.

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