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Endangered alphabets are often the echoes of lost nations, and the Cham alphabet is all too clear an example.From the second century, the Cham people, who are an Austronesian group that migrated from insular Southeast Asia, inhabited Champa, a region now occupied by central and southern Vietnam. One particularly charming origin myth holds that their culture was founded by Lady Po Nagar, who with the help of spirits floated on a log of sandalwood to China, where she married a prince and had two children. She eventually returned to Champa and “did many good deeds helping the sick and the poor.” When she died, a temple was erected in her honor.

More prosaically, the Cham people were defeated by King Minh Mang of Vietnam in 1832. They lost their status, their ownership, their land; many fled westwards into the mountains along the border with Cambodia.

Their language is from the Malayo-Polynesian language family, and has more similarities to Malaysian and even Hawaiian than to Vietnamese and other Mon Khmer languages in Mainland Southeast Asia. Cham script is also distinctive, and is a sign of how powerfully written language evokes a sense of belonging and place, and history. The current standard for traditional Cham script is the inscriptions in Cham on the Po Rome temple in Ninh Thuan province, which was the last Cham temple built before their defeat and loss of the Champa kingdom. The Cham people have been scattered throughout southeast Asia and farther away, such as Malaysia, France, and the United States, but the writing system found on Po Rome temple still informs their script.

The Cham now live in two major groups: the Western Cham of Cambodia and the Eastern Cham (Phan Rang Cham) of Vietnam. There are different sub-groups within these two regions, but among East and West Cham there are distinct varieties of script — Western Cham is slightly more angular and Arabic in influence; Eastern Cham more rounded, more Indic, with influences from Sanskrit. While Western Cham who follow Islam may also use Arabic script for everyday writing purposes, Eastern Cham retain more traditional forms of writing that date back to the Champa civilization. Somehow, what international attention has been focused on Cham seems to have been drawn to eastern Cham; the only tools for western Cham are developed in Cambodia by or with western Cham communities.

Fragmentation is the dry rot of an alphabet — the loss of control, the loss of a critical mass. People find themselves in a dilemma repeated all over the world: to look forward or back? To stand out, or fit in? There’s no longer a consensus over exactly what the script looks like, even among those who continue to use it. A generational fissure opens up and widens.

Traditionally, boys learned the script around the age of twelve when they were old and strong enough to tend to the water buffalo. However, women and girls did not typically learn to read and write.

The sense of the script’s importance, however, goes so deep in Cham culture that, among some Eastern (Ahiér) Cham, learning this script is a rite of passage in funerary ceremonies. As part of a four-day cremation ceremony, one of the rituals that a priest will perform is to kneel down and teach the deceased how to read and write Cham. Only after the human spirit has acquired skills in reading and writing may they become cremated and pass on to the afterlife.
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Links

General Script, Language, and Culture Resources

• Omniglot
• Wikipedia
• Unicode (PDF)
• Cham Audio Dictionary
• CHamstudies — Background on Champa civilization
• Scriptsource
• Cham History Book
• Réhahn Photography
• Project to Digitize Endangered Cham Manuscripts
• Cham manuscript about legends and fortune-telling, from the British Library
• Kauthara.org: Conservation of Cham Language and Script

Community Resources

• Cham Clothing Facebook
• Chamstudies (Closed Group)
• Chamstudies (Open Page)
• Blog for Cham Writers
• Cham Dialect Dictionary Facebook page

Font/Keyboard Resources

• Cham keyboard App
• Google Noto Sans Font
• Cham Font and Keyboard

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According to a single article from Top Média Bénin, at some point in the recent past a member of the Gbékoun community named Togbédji Adigbe created a script for his community–though, as with many indigenously-created African scripts, his ambition was that it might be used by all peoples for all languages in the continent.

“To verify and experience the strength of the mother tongue, a compatriot, [the] late Togbedji ADIGBE, originally from Dangbo, from the village of Mondotokpa put himself in conditions of independence from the West, speaking only his mother tongue and eating only local products. He was able to discover the model of any development that the entire Black continent lacked, namely an alphabet with 33 letters (24 consonants and 9 vowels) capable of transcribing all African languages ​​in reality and the resonance of pronunciations. He used this alphabet to write several works on development themes in the archive currently at his headquarters.”

After his death, his work was reportedly taken up by a compatriot.

“His successor, the late HOUESSE AYIGBEDEKIN Vidéhouenou, a native of Abomey who put himself in the same conditions, in turn used this alphabet to correct certain Western theories taught in our schools and not adapted to our realities.”

In spite of the deaths of both the script’s early champions, it seems to be stable and in use. The type/design company Jamra Patel is working with the user community, and draft fonts and keyboards have been sent to their contact in the user community–which is thought to number about 300–for review and revisions. Final versions of both are expected to be completed in late 2023, and script details are being collected to prepare a Unicode proposal.

Latitude: 9° 19′ 18.20″ N
Longitude: 2° 18′ 36.02″ E

One sign of the importance of writing in the spread of religion—and vice versa—can be seen in the phrase “People of the Book,” an early term of respect for members of  faiths that had written scriptures.

It may also be the only script ever to have been created to write a language no longer in everyday use.

Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest continuously-practiced religions. Possibly as much as 3,500 years old and traditionally based on the teachings of Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), Zoroastrianism was the state religion of the Persian Empires for more than a thousand years, from around 600 BCE until the Muslim conquest.

The language used in the early practice of Zoroastrianism was Old and Young Avestan, actually a pair of related regional Indo-Iranian languages. This pair of languages have so completely died out, though, that all we know of it/them is what survived in Zoroastrian liturgical use. This hyper-narrowing led to a remarkable situation in which this pair of languages were named backwards: the Avesta is the primary collection of religious texts of Zoroastrianism, so the languages have come to be called Avestan—even though they were functionally extinct, in a daily-use sense, by the time the Avestan texts were written!

The development of the Avestan alphabet, starting around the fifth or sixth century CE, may have been the result of the religion’s desire to compete with Buddhists, Christians, and Manicheans, each of which were, in their own ways and before the Islamic phrase had been coined, people of the book. The Zoroastrian religion, until that point, had been based on oral tradition—a recitation of prayers in specific cadence and inflection, passed down from teacher-priests to their pupils, accompanied by rituals in which a text would have been an encumbrance and a distraction. A phonetic written form would allow for a greater exactness of pronunciation, and a more coherent body of wisdom.

The right-to-left script devised to write the Avesta ultimately consisted of 53 characters—the majority derived from Pahlavi which, in turn was derived ultimately from Aramaic, some seemingly adapted from Greek, and a few invented specifically for the purpose. It was a full alphabet, with characters for vowels and came with a unique system of punctuation.

All languages and scripts associated with religions, however, are both protected and vulnerable as the fortunes of the religion rise and fall, and Avestan, being functionally extinct outside the Zoroastrian setting, was especially vulnerable.

Once the Sasanian Empire had fallen to the Arabs by 651 CE, Zoroastrianism began to decline. It survived mainly in what nowadays may seem an unusual context: India.

Over the next several centuries, many Persian Zoroastrians decided to escape persecution and preserve their religious traditions by fleeing eastwards into Sindh and Gujarat, where they were known as Parsis, meaning “Persians.” They were granted permission to stay by the local ruler, Jadi Rana, on the condition that they adopt the local language, Gujarati, and that their women adopt local dress, the sari.

The Parsis developed a substantial Zoroastrian community in India, especially in Gujarat, and many of the religion’s surviving documents originate in India. But the everyday language of the community steadily changed—to Gujarati with Sindhi, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali or other regional languages used for trade and mercantile reasons and interacting with domestic help. Many of the ancient texts were preserved in translation, especially into Persian and Gujarati, using the Persian and Gujarati scripts.

From the 19th century onward, the Parsis gained a reputation for their education and widespread influence in all aspects of society. They played an instrumental role in the economic development of the region over many decades; several of the best-known business conglomerates of India such as the Godrej and Tata groups are run by Parsi-Zoroastrians.

At the request of the government of Tajikistan, UNESCO declared 2003 a year to celebrate the “3000th anniversary of Zoroastrian culture,” and in 2011 it was announced that for the first time in the history of modern Iran and of the modern Zoroastrian communities worldwide, women had been ordained in Iran and North America as mobedyars, or assistant clergy, authorized to perform the lower-rung religious functions and initiate people into the religion, though this step is highly contentious, largely supported by the Iranian Zoroastrians but not the vast majority of Parsis.

Today the world population of Zoroastrians is perhaps a little more than 100,000 (with the greatest population center being around Mumbai, with smaller groups elsewhere in the region, and the world), and is shrinking.

Yet even though the Avestan script remains at the core of Zoroastrian worship, it has become curiously asemic: only scholars and priests can read it, and for the devout faithful it survives as a series of symbols with spiritual weight rather than literal meaning or phonetic value, representing a language that died more than 2,000 years ago.

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Wherever there is a minority community, especially a scattered minority community, it is not unusual to have more than one script for the language, sometimes competing with each other.

The Badugu Raju script (so named to distinguish it from other Banugu scripts) was invented by Anandhan Raju in 2009 for Badaga, a South Dravidian language spoken by people in the Nilgiri Hills, Tamil Nadu, India.

Anandhan, from Thangadu Oranaai, is presently the Computer Science Teacher in Chamraj Higher Secondary School, Chamraj. He writes:

“It gives me great pleasure to announce that I have developed an alphabet for Badugu, a language hitherto without a writing system, spoken by a member of one of the native peoples of the Nilgiris called Badaga. What is more, I have created a true type font and named it BaduguAnandha using a computer program.

“Inspired by my father Sri.R.Raju son of late Sri B.Ranga Gowder of Thangadu Oranaai, I took to researching the Badugu language, my mother tongue. Studying the phonology of Badugu had indeed been a labour of love to me. Though a Baduga, I learned Badugu afresh in order to have a very good understanding of the system of sound patterns of the language, which later proved to be a groundbreaking piece of research. It would be ungrateful if I did not acknowledge Rev. Philip Mulley for his help during the research.

“What I discovered was a notably unique feature of the Badugu vowel system. It is the presence of Retracted Vowel sounds. I call them so, because when articulating these vowels, the tongue retracts automatically. It is my contention that the Retracted Vowel sounds antedate the Retroflex sounds. It can clearly be seen that a presumptive pattern of sound change had occurred over the years. The Retracted Vowel sounds found the Retroflex sounds as their complementary sounds i.e. retraction of the tongue by natural process complemented with flexion of the tongue resulted in retroflexion of the tongue. It is evident that when you articulate a vowel sound that immediately precedes a retroflex sound the tongue retracts giving way to flexion naturally. From the foregoing, it is quite possible to say that Badugu is one of the Proto-South-Dravidian dialects that has undergone separate linguistic development despite the fact that it resembles Kannada in certain correspondences jointly in sound and in meaning. It is to be noted that Badugu shares such systems not only with Kannada but also with other Dravidian languages too.

“Badugu is a separate language having a typical phonological structure. The autonomous status of Badugu has been hinted at in “Language and Society in South Asia by Michael C.Shapiro and Harold F.Schiffman, 1981:100”. A separate language suggests a separate alphabet specially developed for it. ”

Arguing that neither the Tamil nor the Kannada scripts would adequately represent all the sounds in Badugu, he concluded:

“It is my conviction that Badugu must have a separate writing system because it is a separate language. I hope every Baduga would proudly welcome the development of the Badugu Alphabet and the creation of a Badugu Font and use them to read and write Badugu henceforth to keep the Badugu language alive.”

Only one problem: it is not clear whether anyone is actually using Raju’s script. Instead, in 1967-68 another Badaga script, referred to as Badugu Raj after its creator, Yogesh Raj of Kadasoley village, has received official recognition from Baduga Mahajana Sangha, the umbrella organization of Badagas. The Badugu Raj script can be seen on multilingual/multiscriptural signage in the region, and is reportedly been taught in various villages.

And there are reports of yet another Badugu script created by Chutti Saravanan in 2010, about which we, for now at least, know nothing.

This entry is clearly threadbare, and relies on very few sources. We would love to hear from anyone who can add to our meagre knowledge.

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All over the world, cultures create fabrics whose designs (woven, painted, or printed) are not merely decorative, but significant—that is, they tell histories, identify their villages of origin, incorporate information about the weaver or the wearer, possess sacred meaning, and so on.

Three of the West African fabric designs are bogolanfini (Mali), korhogo (Côte d’Ivoire) and Fon appliqué (Benin).

Fon appliqué is a traditional celebratory fabric art that has been associated with the court of Dahomey for some 300 years, achieving such status that Fon appliquéd cloths were given to other nations as tokens of friendship.

European accounts from the mid-nineteenth century illustrate the presence of appliquéd cloths for use as tents, umbrellas and wall hangings. Even since the 1890s, when the Fon kingdom was officially defeated by the French, appliqués continued to be used as emblems of power and authority for enduring royalty and other leadership contexts. For example, men’s social groups, which share work or expenses of funerals, still use appliquéd banners. Such cloths also console mourners at funerals, where the cloths are referred to as “the cloth to dry your tears.”

The appliqués were made by Fon men and boys belonging to a family guild that passed designs down generation by generation. The guilds maintained vast collections of visual images that a client could specify for a banner. The kings then controlled the production and use of these works of art for the purpose of presenting themselves in splendor to the people. The artisans executed these designs to the specifications of their kings and they were hung as banners of battle in the palaces. Each textile depicts the story of a king, chief or warrior and tells of their achievements in history, often in symbolic form.

Several steps are involved in making the appliquéd cloth. The shape of the objects is cut out and tacked onto a backcloth to hold them in position; this flexibility allows for easy changes of place in the design. When an artist is satisfied with his composition, he hems the pattern into its definite form after tucking in the edges. The artist also pays a lot of attention to the outside borders of the background cloth which are treated as though they were a picture frame.

The banners were displayed on special occasions on rooftops, on pavilions, on large umbrellas and on hats worn by royalty. The banner is read from left to right and from top to bottom, beginning with the oldest, most ancient kings and ending with the last kings before the country was claimed by France.

There were often many symbols for any particular king because the meaning of an image might reflect a distinctive characteristic of the king, such as his strength, or it might commemorate a specific event during the king’s reign, or it might relate to a magical story about the king. The artists design the composition, using the image against a dark or contrasting background. In terms of style, the images – birds, animals, people, weapons and, occasionally, plant life such as vines and trees and fruit – were simple, direct and minimal. They could be readily identified with the essence of the object. As such, they became symbols rather than detailed reproductions.

Some common symbols:

Tegbessou: the buffalo wearing a tunic. “A buffalo wearing clothing is difficult to disrobe.” Under King Tegbessou, Oyo (Yoruba) captured Abomey, and thereafter an annual tribute, including 41 young men and 41 young women to serve as slaves, had to be sent to Oyo.

Kpengla: the sparrow. “The stone in the water does not fear the cold.” This represents the king who died of smallpox, as did many Dahomean kings.

Agonglo: the pineapple. This means “Lightning falls on the palm tree, but the pineapple escapes it.”

Atagdoujiuhoun: the Yoruba king Atagdoujiuhoun being hanged. Glele had captured him as he had been selling Dahomeans as slaves. When Glele died, Behanzin hanged the Yoruba.

Behanzin: the shark and the egg. “The world holds the egg which the ground wants.” This represents the last great king of Dahomey. Conflict with the French led to his downfall. He was taken to Martinique where he died. Although his bones were returned to Abomey for burial, many Dahomeans preferred to believe he had changed himself into a bird and survived.

Houegbadja: the fish and the wicker fish trap. “The fish which escapes from the trap does not return.” The represents the second king of Dahomey who was also a cultural hero. He is credited with solidifying control of the plateau of Abomey and, among other things, introducing weaving to the people.

Ago-Li-Agbo: the foot, the pebble, the bow and the broom. “Allada tripped but did not fall.” This represents a king who was considered a puppet of the French, so he is not usually included in the list of true kings.

Gangnihuessou: the bird and the drum. This represents the older brother of the first king.

Ghezo: the buffalo without clothing. “No cardinal-bird with red tail and wings ever starts a brush-fire.” This represents a powerful king who freed Dahomey from Oyo in 1827. He was in direct contact with the Ashanti king. He was defeated by the Egba at Abeokuta in 1851. Although considered humane, he refused to stop the sale of slaves.

Spindle: the spindle is another symbol of Gezo. “As the thread comes close to the spindle, people should come close to Gezo for protection.”

Agadja: the ship “Nobody could set fire to the tree fallen with all its limbs and green leaves.” Agadja represents a king who conquered Whydah and extended his rule to the sea. The first to contact Europeans, his graphic symbol is a European vessel. He also conquered Allada, thus establishing the kingdom of Dahomey as it was known to the whites.

Akaba: the boar. “Slowly, softly, the chameleon reaches the top of the bombax tree.” This represents the son of Houegbadja the last king to rule before the coming of the Europeans.

Glele: the Lion. “The lion’s teeth are fully grown, and he is the terror of all.”

Dako: the jar of indigo and the flint (strike-a-light). “Dako kills his mother-in-law and the jar of indigo rolls.” In some traditional histories this is said to be a chief of the Fon who murdered a neighbouring chief named Da, cut open his belly, Home, and built a palace on the body at Abomey, thus the Kingdom of Dahomey.

The head of two enemy chiefs: these were defeated and ordered to live in Abomey. They refused to do so, and were killed. Their heads were set on the house which had been built for them.

Today in Benin and elsewhere the appliqué continues to contain the simple, symbolic images of the older traditions. However, the pieces are less likely to contain the aggressive and war-like images of the older royal messages. Now made both for tourists and local consumption, Fon appliquéd cloths are endearingly symbolic to the locals and as items of trade.

This profile is a condensed version of “Decoding The Symbolism Of Bogolanfini, Korhogo And Fon Fabrics” by M. Akrofi, S. P. Ocran, and R. Acquaye.

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All over the world, cultures create fabrics whose designs (woven, painted, or printed) are not merely decorative, but significant—that is, they tell histories, identify their villages of origin, incorporate information about the weaver or the wearer, possess sacred meaning, and so on.

Three of the West African fabric designs are bogolanfini (Mali), korhogo (Côte d’Ivoire) and the fon appliqué (Benin).

Korhogo is made by the Senufo people of the Côte d’Ivoire, and are named after the village of Korhogo in the northern part of the country. Entering a Korhogo village, the visitor is met with hundreds of such pieces of aartwork attached to mud-brick walls and spread on the ground.

The korhogo style originally started as wall paintings at the various shrines in the area. The wall paintings usually wore off in no time because they were painted with natural dyes that did not last. The need to prolong the life of drawings on the walls of shrines in the town inspired the subculture of cloth-making, and over time, the Senufo people developed an indigenous cottage industry in fabric production.

They divide the fabric production processes along gender lines. Both men and women may tend the cotton plants. After harvest, the women usually clean and spin the cotton into yarns. Men then weave the rough yarns into strips about four inches wide, using hand looms. Several strips are sewn together to make a “canvas.” Women make the dyes that the men use to design the cloth. Korhogo cloth has fairly loose weave and sometimes stretches during machine stitching, although the amount of stretching varies with each piece of fabric. The cloth has an obvious weave and looks similar to raw silk.

The woven cloth is stretched very flat on a board and secured by means of small pegs. Without any preliminary sketch, the designer traces the designs with his knife after having dipped it into the dye. The first lines are very fine; they are subsequently reinforced by new tracings. In more recent times, this is done using a stencil and the painting is done with a specially fermented solution that slowly turns black.

Traditionally, the mud decoration is produced using the application of two natural dyes. The first of these dyes is made from boiled leaves and is greenish-yellow in color; the second is formed from decayed swamp mud extracted from the roots of trees. An iron-bonding agent in the mud is said to cause the dye to interact with the coarse fibres and thereby create a permanent color. The mud decoration is hand painted onto the cloth using a stencil.

In another process a yellowish solution that contains a dye from the nigeneme tree is painted directly, without preliminary sketching, onto the cloth. The cloth is immersed in a black dye obtained from the marigot, a pool or muddy place in a stream bed. When washed later, only the surface covered by the nigeneme dye retains the black dye. The nigeneme dye makes the black dye fast and permanent. Artists also paint directly with a mixture of dyes and banga and juice from lemon. Banga is a strong solution which helps to make the dye permanent. This dye produces rich magenta-red and burnt sienna hues when mixed with the ingredients.

Originally the korhogo cloth was used for religious purposes, but never worn. The designs on the cloth will always represent a cherished ideal, favored celebration or give honor to respected animals. Nowadays korhogo fabrics are used for clothes, pillows, and wall decorations, with black ink used in place of dyes, and machine-woven fabric in place of natural cotton.

Some common korhogo symbols

Tree: The tree represents the sacred woods where Poro ceremonies take place.

Snake: The snake is a symbol of the earth which he encircles with his tail in his mouth. This circle represents the world; the day the snake lets go of his tail the world will cease to exist. The snake is often represented in different Senufo art objects, especially jewellery such as bracelets and rings. The Senufo constantly remind West Africans that their existence is tied to the slightest gesture of the snake.

Goat: the goat evokes male sexual power. It is often a liturgical subject for the Senufo sculptor who makes the statue for certain propitiatory rites by the priestess of the Poro women’s school.

Crocodile: this signifies the fertility of the male. According to folktales, there was a sacred crocodile in the waters of Korhogo whose back was decorated with cowries. He appeared every ten years to announce future events. The ten years correspond to the ten days of the creation of the world in the Senufo religion.

Guinea Fowl: birds in general have important roles, being animals associated with celestial powers. The guinea fowl and the chicken represent maternal virtues and feminine beauty.

Hunter: the hunter signifies life’s mysteries.

Bird: the bird signifies freedom.

Swallow: a Senufo chief must always have swallows in his home. With the swallows he makes sacrifices to win the trust of the population and power over them.

Fish Bone: fish bones indicate inevitable drought, thirst and famine.

Fish: this signifies vitality and abundance. Where there are fish, there is bound to be water–vital in a drought-prone area such as northern Côte d’Ivoire.

Lion: the lion signifies royalty. The specialist in religion used lion eyes mixed with other elements to inspire fear of the chief and submission of the people.

Chameleon: the chameleon has an important dual role.  Its evil side is the messenger of death and the leprosy carrier. Its good side permits the chameleon to cure epilepsy.

Turtle: the turtle is considered one of the first animals created. It is believed that its slowness indicates its fear that the earth will crumble under his feet.

This profile is a condensed version of “Decoding The Symbolism Of Bogolanfini, Korhogo And Fon Fabrics” by M. Akrofi, S. P. Ocran, and R. Acquaye.

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