15 Minute Language Story | Tim Brookes

When Writing Disappears, So Do Stories

A Reflection on Language, Human Rights, and Cultural Survival with Tim Brookes

In this powerful excerpt from 15 Minute Language Stories with Norah Jones, Tim Brookes reminds us that the loss of language is never accidental. Languages and writing systems do not simply fade away on their own — they are often erased through policy, invasion, forced assimilation, or the pressures of economic and cultural dominance.

Drawing from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Tim highlights a reality that is often overlooked: linguistic rights are human rights. Communities should have the freedom to speak their own languages, preserve their writing systems, name their own places, and continue the cultural practices tied to their identity. Yet around the world, many communities continue to struggle for those basic rights.

One of the most striking ideas from this conversation is the connection between endangered scripts and social justice. When a writing system disappears, it is not just letters that vanish. Histories disappear. Stories disappear. Ways of seeing the world disappear.

“Linguistic rights are human rights.” — Tim Brookes

This short conversation invites listeners to think more deeply about the relationship between language, identity, dignity, and belonging. It is a reminder that preserving language is not simply about communication — it is about protecting people, culture, and memory.

15 Minute Language Stories with Norah Jones creates space for voices and experiences that challenge us to listen more carefully to the world around us. In just a few minutes, these conversations reveal how language shapes not only how we speak, but how we live, connect, and understand one another.

Make sure to check out Tim’s latest book, By Hand: Can the Art of Writing be Saved?, available at https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/by-hand/. 

Transcript

Tim Brookes (00:05)
All peoples are alike in dignity and respect, they are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood. And several things struck me about that. One was that, you know, many of these are endangered because people don’t…

Act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. So this is actually the first really substantial point that I would like to make. Languages and scripts do not just die out. The way in which the narrative is often written is exactly the same as the way in which the extinction of species used to be written, namely that this animal died out, these birds died out.

Invariably, the loss of a language or a script, obviously my focus, is the result of policy. It’s the result of invasion. It’s possibly genocide, possibly economic invasion, where one culture finds that it cannot survive without taking on the guise of a more powerful culture nearby.

And consequently, these really high-minded statements in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are really being violated. Even more so, if you, much less well-known is the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And there, there is this declaration, which of course is signed by all member nations, that basically says that

Norah Jones (01:41)
Hmm.

Tim Brookes (01:48)
Indigenous people have the right to name their own places, to use their own language and their own script if it exists, to maintain their own ceremonies, etc. And as far as I know, there is not a single country in the world that fulfills the spirit and letter of that declaration. So there’s this saying that, you know, linguistic rights are human rights.

And that is absolutely true. And endangered scripts are always the sign of some kind of abrogation of human rights or some kind of violation of social and human justice.

When I had been working on the alphabets for about a year and a half, I was actually going for a completely different reason to Bangladesh. I was actually doing some public health work there. And before I left, I put the word out to the internet at large, are there any endangered alphabets in Bangladesh? And fortunately, a couple of people not only got back to me, but actually gave me some contacts. And so I arrive at Dhaka in the middle of the monsoon, which is an experience in itself.

Tim Brookes (03:10)
And, I get visited by representatives of three ethnic groups who are indigenous groups living in the Chittagong hill tracks of Southern, Southeastern Bangladesh, who are essentially entirely marginalized and actually kind of disavowed by the government as a whole, so much so that there is no education that is delivered to them in their language.

Norah Jones (03:31)
Hmm.

Tim Brookes (03:39)
So when they first go to school, they don’t understand what the teacher is saying. And the government’s attitude then, and I think to some extent probably still is, we’re doing them a favor by forcing them to learn our language. In terms of scripts, there were actually two or three scripts that were specific to these groups.

But what was…fascinating was that none of the people who visited me could write anything for me in them. I was going to say I will carve something for you in your script. None of them could do it. One of them was actually a TV producer in Dachau, a successful person, a Chakma, an ethnic Chakma, but he couldn’t read and write Chakma because despite the fact that his father had been the greatest living and had the largest collection of Chakma books and manuscripts in their village, sorry, in the world, in his hut in their village. But the army had come in, killed his father, and burned the house down. And so he grew up not being able to read and write his own script. And I began to realize this is what it’s like to be on the other side.

And from then on, instead of being an exercise in curiosity and sort of intellectual adventure, it then became the endangered alphabets really became an exercise in advocacy and in attempting to find all of these cultures, many of whom are very much off the radar, precisely because they are marginalized in this way.

So the first step was the carving. And I hadn’t really thought about it when I started this, but when you have something, when you have signage, especially when you have signage that is made with a certain degree of care or is unusual, then it has two qualities that are really valuable. One is that it’s authoritative. So if you put a piece of writing, up on a wall. The only stuff that goes up on a wall in terms of signage is stuff that is important, right? It’s because the teacher or the local government administrator or whatever has to have approved it or even created it. And so for many of these kids to see their own writing, their own script up on the wall was new and inspiring, so much so that

We had to get the headmaster of the school to take the sign down from his office and put it up in the school where the kids could see it. The other thing it does is that if it’s regarded as art, then art and beauty have a very curious impact on people. They have the ability both to capture people’s attention and also to… in a sense, elevate their sense of correspondence to that thing. And so it became a way of giving respect to the unrespected or disrespected or whatever. So the carving continues to this day, and I’ve done carvings for individuals, I’ve done carvings for organizations, for libraries, and many of them are on display in areas of the world where that carving essentially says you belong, you have the right to a foothold on this earth. And that’s one great difference between an endangered language and an endangered script. An endangered script, you can see it, it has that iconicity of being right there.

Become a Sponsor