Interested in writing systems? Look no further
Every year, people around the world mark international days celebrating a wide variety of themes, such as the International Day of Education, World Wildlife Day, and World Tourism Day. I’m sure many of these are familiar; I, for one, used to take part in activities celebrating some of these days when I was in primary school.
Most people don’t know, however, that there are a whole host of days dedicated to language-related topics, including World Braille Day and International Mother Language Day. One of the most interesting, and also one that I hadn’t heard of before this year, is World Endangered Writing Day.
World Endangered Writing Day was initiated by Tim Brookes in 2024. Brookes is the head of the Endangered Alphabets Project, which strives to maintain endangered writing systems and cultures. The second annual World Endangered Writing Day was held just over a week ago, on Thursday 23rd January 2025, and featured a captivating selection of talks, interviews and presentations around the theme of endangered writing systems. Topics included the creation of new scripts, the management of fonts for minority writing systems at Google Fonts, and an ancient 1000-year old Filipino script.
The 2024 lineup was equally engaging, dealing with topics such as the extinction, revival and teaching of endangered writing systems. Recordings of the 2024 content are available on the Endangered Alphabets Project YouTube channel, and will hopefully soon be joined by the 2025 recordings.
As a learner of Mandarin Chinese, which uses an entirely different writing system compared to English, I have long been interested in discovering more about the world’s scripts. Although I didn’t get the chance to attend the live talks from 2024 or 2025, I hope to be able to attend in 2026. If you’re interested in endangered languages and writing systems, I’ll see you there!
Do you know of any other language-related events throughout the year? Any days devoted to celebrating the wonder that is language? Let me know in the comments!
