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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.
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.
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Reviews
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.
An Atlas of Endangered Languages is a voyage of visual expression, which illuminates the spiritual bond between languages and their writing systems. It reminds us of the culture, ecology, and mythic resonance in every glyph. Read it. You'll end up curious about what makes us different, proud of what makes us the same, and eager to explore what will no doubt feel like a larger, more lovely world.