Tim Brookes

World Endangered Writing Day II, January 23rd, 2025

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Kulitan final scaled

A day of talks, discussions, activities, and awards in support of the world’s minority and indigenous scripts and their communities

The world has 300 writing systems, but 90 % of them are threatened—not used for official purposes, not taught in schools, ignored or actively suppressed.

This crisis is almost universally ignored. There are no degree programs in writing systems or script loss, no government agencies dedicated to addressing the issue, no funding available for script research or revival.

First launched on January 23rd 2024, World Endangered Writing Day is hoping to change all that.

The inaugural event introduced community members from all over the world working to save their cultures by saving their scripts, scholars studying rare writing systems … ↪

World Endangered Writing Day: January 23rd, 2024

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WEWD poster2

World Endangered Writing Day was born out of a suggestion by David Crystal, the author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, and many other books on language topics.

He was reading through the manuscript of my new book Writing Beyond Writing: Lessons from Endangered Alphabets, and came to the passage where I say that in traditional Balinese culture one day a year, the day consecrated to Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom, Balinese revere their books, and writing itself.

Nothing written may be destroyed, or even a letter crossed out. Each household takes out its books (which in Balinese tradition are oblong pages of palm leaf, written on with a stylus and then bound between wooden slats), dusts them off, … ↪