The Missing Scripts program aims to preserve the rich diversity of the world’s languages and protect indigenous scripts, ensuring their existence in the digital sphere. This initiative, launched as part of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL 2022-2032), was presented at the UNESCO World Conference on Cultural and Arts Education (WCCAE) in February 2024 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Nearly half of the world’s writing systems remain unencoded, leaving them excluded from the digital world and at risk of extinction. To address this, the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique in Nancy (France), the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz (Germany), and the Script Encoding Initiative at the University of California at Berkeley (USA) have joined forces. Together, they are working to integrate these endangered and minority scripts into the Unicode standard and provide them with a typographic form.

The Script Encoding Initiative (SEI), led by researchers Anushah Hossain and Deborah Anderson in the Linguistics Department, recently received grants from the Internet Society Foundation ($300,000) and the Mellon Foundation ($1M) for research on digital inclusion of diverse writing systems. SEI aims to increase the number of writing systems available on digital devices and study the processes by which inclusion occurs.

When it comes to digital access and internet technologies, some languages are still more equal than others. Speakers of majority languages, who type in English or text in Korean, assume their message will be transmitted accurately. But Indigenous language communities don’t share this same confidence.

In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new numeral system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers—creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm.

Kaktovik is one of the most northerly settlements in the United States, a village of about 300 on the rugged, freezing north coast of Alaska. It is also the birthplace of a new way of writing numbers: Kaktovik numerals, which were developed in the 1990s, taught in Alaskan schools, and are now widely available in a way they have never been before.

The effort to digitize the Tulu script is a small slice of a much larger worldwide problem. Like many languages around the world, Tulu might soon disappear: UNESCO identifies it as one of 192 languages from India that are “in danger.” Globally,  40% of the over 7,000 languages spoken by humanity are at risk. In the last century, hundreds have gone extinct, taking with them stories, cultural traditions, ethnic identities, and a bounty of other information from the past. One way to preserve a language is to ensure it’s digitized, so that its speakers can continue expressing themselves as technology evolves.

Son líneas rectas, puntos y círculos que, unidos, forman caracteres extraños: emes y erres al revés, una especie de piruleta, flechas con varias puntas… Se trata de los caracteres de la lengua ibérica, una de las que hablaban nuestros antepasados en la península.

Pero no esperes encontrar estos símbolos en tu teclado, al lado de los emojis, o en el menú de símbolos del procesador de textos, junto a rayas largas o comillas angulares. De momento: un grupo de españoles, estadounidenses y un martiniqués trabajan para que pronto lo hagas.

It was Iravatham Mahadevan’s ‘Early Tamil Epigraphy’ that opened doors to Tamil-Brahmi, the earliest script for old Tamil. But it was only after the development of a Unicode font that the script became popular, particularly among researchers and language enthusiasts.

Developed by Ramana Sharma, Vinodh Rajan and Udhaya Sankar, the font contains both open type and graphite table and is compatible with a wide variety of systems.

Thanks to the inventive efforts of the Unicode Consortium – the same folks behind modern day emojis – as well as linguistics preservation organisations like the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI), Ancient Egypt’s endangered lingua franca can still live on in our monolithic little phones. So bird rectangle crown, Unicode Consortium, and a feather cone circle to boot.

If King Tut were around today, could he send a text in Egyptian hieroglyphics? Yes, with the right font and keyboard. That’s because the writing system of the pharaohs has already been included in the Unicode Standard, meaning that a character like the Eye of Horus has a code point, 13080, that will render the same way on a tablet in Cairo and a smartphone in Beijing. Because Mayan hieroglyphs have yet to be encoded, the ancient Mayan emperor K’inich Janaab’ Pakal would have to stick to emoji—but that’s about to change.

‘Googlear’, traducir o wasapear como si dominara el lenguaje del antiguo Egipto está a la vuelta de la esquina.

Unicode se ha propuesto incorporar el jeroglífico a la revolución digital.

El complejo universo de los jeroglíficos, descifrado tras el hallazgo de la piedra de Rosetta en el siglo XVIII, centra ahora el baile de Unicode, el estándar de codificación de caracteres pergeñado para permitir el tratamiento informático, la transmisión y la visualización de textos en múltiples lenguajes. Su consorcio acaba de hacer público un borrador para la codificación de los jeroglíficos egipcios. “Contar con estos caracteres en Unicode permitirá que la gente pueda enviar textos con jeroglíficos sin necesidad de fuentes especiales o no estandarizadas.

Since its creation was announced in 2015, the “Adopt a Character” program, through which individuals and organizations can sponsor any characters, including emojis, has raised more than $200,000. A percentage of the proceeds goes to support the Script Encoding Initiative, a research project based at Berkeley, which is headed by the linguistics researcher Deborah Anderson, who is devoted to making Unicode truly universal. One the consortium recently accepted is called Nyiakeng Puachue Hmong, devised for the Hmong language by a minister in California whose parishioners have been using it for more than 25 years. Still in the proposal stage is Tigalari, once used to write Sanskrit and other Indian languages.

The way the world’s languages are displayed digitally can be a topic of raging, if somewhat arcane, debate. Coders and designers may disagree over whether a particular script has differentiated upper and lower cases, or which set of accents it needs. But the latest discussion, about emoji (the icons used in electronic communications to convey meaning or emotion—think smiling yellow faces), has been stickier than most.

Twenty-six years ago, two brothers decided their native language needed a new alphabet. The scripts they’d been using to read and write their native Fulani, an African language spoken by at least 40 million people, weren’t working well.

Fulani’s sounds were rendered imprecisely by the Arabic alphabet, the script most often used to write it; the Latin alphabet presented similar problems. Neither the Arabic nor the Latin alphabets could accurately spell Fulani words that require producing a “b” or a “d” sound while gulping in air, for example, so Fulani speakers had modified both alphabets with new symbols—often in inconsistent ways.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced awards to support UC Berkeley research on American slavery, rehousing of classical artifacts and translating Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphs and other scripts into an international character-encoding standard.

Unicode, he explained, is the universal coding standard for script.

It’s the reason you can email someone in China and they can read it, or I can text my Dad’s Android from iOS and he can yell text me back in all caps because he doesn’t know how not to (not Unicode’s fault), or that I can build a web page and Google can find that page for someone else, no matter where they are, even someone in space using rocket software. It’s a universal character language that all computers speak. The digital tower of Babel.

MICHAEL EVERSON, a 40-year-old typographer who lives in Dublin, considers himself blessed because he has found his life’s work: to be an alphabetician to all the peoples of the world. Mr. Everson’s largest project to date – a contribution to a new version of Unicode 4.0, an international standard for computerizing text – is cementing his reputation.