Welcome to World Endangered Writing Day 2026!
The Schedule of Live Events
Coming soon!
The News
The Script Keepers Network
Perhaps the most exciting and positive news for World Endangered Writing Day is the creation and development, over the past nine months, of the Script Keepers Network.
It’s one thing to discover and study endangered writing systems, but the act of revitalizing and promoting them has largely been a struggle by a few individuals in minority cultures working in isolation with little support or technical expertise from the broader world.
The Script Keepers Network is a volunteer organization devoted to bringing together two sets of people: those who are working to revive their traditional scripts (or support emerging ones), and those who want to help them by offering skills, time and energy.
The network is up and running and growing. Visit its website to discover what projects are already under way.
Writing Studies: The Curriculum of the Future
Since the birth of linguistics, spoken language has been documented, researched and taught in many, many dimensions. One of the newest, how to revitalize threatened languages, is now a recognized specialization, doing fine work on every continent.
Strange, then, that the same keen investigation has not been applied to written language. We propose a discipline yet to be recognized, provisionally called Writing Studies. Check out its prospectus and a pilot discussion video here.
The Tributes
A Tribute to the Martyrs
A commonly-used but misleading phrase is “failed scripts,” describing writing forms that were invented but failed to catch on and flourish—because it implies there was something deficient about the script, or its inventor, or that scripts undergo a Darwinian contest in which the fittest survive and the others fail through natural causes.
In fact, anyone who creates a script for their community, especially a minority community, becomes a threat to the powers that be. We know of script creators who have been harassed, jailed, exiled, even assassinated. This blog post tells the stories of four who were martyred for their efforts.
A Tribute to the Scholarly Pioneers
On World Endangered Writing Day 2024 we presented a Hall of Fame celebrating the people who, in the very early days of the script revitalization movement (namely, the 1990s and the 2000s) helped create fonts for and digitize minority scripts at a time when it was an unheard-of pursuit.
This year we offer a short selection of the vital early scholarly work that was carried out by the few researchers—almost all anthropologists—who went out into the field to study, document and illuminate some of the world’s most fascinating written forms—though that phrase is misleading, as they showed how some graphic information systems extend our understanding of writing in thought-provoking ways that go well beyond the limits of the Latin alphabet.
Piers Kelly began his career by studying the mysterious and perplexing Eskayan script of the Philippines, but then broadened his vision to include many of the indigenously-created scripts of West Africa and Southeast Asia. In this article he documents the importance of writing-creation narratives—especially among cultures who once had writing, but then lost it.
Cécile Guillaume-Pey wrote one of the seminal articles that demonstrate how letters (specifically among the Sora people of eastern India) can have sacred, ceremonial and mystical values, and simply reciting them may constitute communication with the divine.
Sabine Hyland is one of the pioneers of research into Mesoamerican and Andean traditional information systems, notably khipu or quipu. Far from being simple means of accounting, she has shown that these are multidimensional devices in which even texture and color play important roles.
The Content
Endangered Photo Gallery
It’s one thing to see an unfamiliar script laid out as a grid on Wikipedia, or Omniglot; it’s something very different to see it in its natural habitat, written by hand, using traditional tools and writing materials. The latter gives us the chance to see how it is used, how and why it has taken the form we now see, and what it means to its user community. Thanks to Jeremiah Fly for curating this gallery of photos showing writing as it is written.
[Link is coming soon!]
Endangered Video Reel
One of the dramatic and largely positive changes in the world landscape of minority writing, starting about 20 years ago and accelerating rapidly, has been the use of video. At one end, it has enabled community members to teach their scripts to each other, and especially to those who have been scattered across the world to escape oppression and/or seek work; at the other end, it gives those of us in the privileged world a chance to see particular forms of writing as expressions of particular cultures and to better understand those relationships. Thanks to Lorelei Wall for curating this reel of videos that show writing as an act, an art, a vital cultural expression.
[Link is coming soon!]