The Endangered Alphabets Project is out of the gates and running!
The exhibition of carvings is going to perform the unlikely feat of appearing in two places at once.
As of September 13th, a mini-version of the show will be on display at the annual expo of the Foundation for Endangered Languages at the University of Wales in Carmarthen, Wales, a high honor indeed.
Meanwhile, the majority of the boards will be one of the features of the Burlington Book Festival in Burlington, Vermont. They’ll be on view from September 24-October 22, and I’ll be giving a talk about them as part of the Book Festival on Saturday, September 25.
The Endangered Alphabets book is already past the proof stage and should be leaving the printers any day now. Copies will be available wherever the boards are displayed, and through this website.
What is the Endangered Alphabets project? Well, for complete details, click this link, but here’s a brief introduction.
The world has more than 6,000 languages, but in every respect that number and that variety is dwindling rapidly. Half are expected to be extinct by the end of this century.
But another and even more dramatic way in which this cultural diversity is shrinking concerns the alphabets in which those languages are written. Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. Moreover, fully a third are endangered. The Latin alphabet—the ABC of the West—has gone from being the alphabet of military empire to the alphabet of economic empires and, most recently, of the Internet. On a global scale, writing is already dominated by as few as five major alphabets: Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese and Japanese.
The Endangered Alphabets Project, which consists of an exhibition of carvings and a book, is the first-ever attempt to address this issue.
Work on the Endangered Alphabets Project has been supported by Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, by Sterling Hardwoods, also in Burlington, and also by the many researchers, linguists, scholars and correspondents who have helped me track down these rare and vanishing scripts.
By the way: the exhibition is already booked at various venues through next spring, but my dream is for the exhibition to go on a grand World Tour, visiting every country represented in the show. Clearly, I can’t come close to affording this myself, and I doubt whether many of the peoples whose scripts are endangered can afford to fund their own leg of the world tour. The only way this is going to happen is if some major foundation, government or corporation funds it. If anyone has any suggestions who that might be, don’t be shy about suggesting them!





