Paths to Proliferation
Neil Patel, Mark Jamra, Morgane Pierson
The Garay alphabet was created in 1961 by Assane Faye to write Wolof and, more widely, to transcribe African languages. It was with this desire for linguistic reappropriation and to facilitate children’s education that Faye developed the Garay script. After spending decades outside the digital world, the Garay alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in September 2024 with the release of version 16.0. But encoding was not the final achievement — it was the beginning.
Through our own experiences of working with neographies over the past decade, we have seen a multitude of ways in which they evolve, are developed and deployed. While the motivation behind the creation of these novel writing systems is similar, how each proliferates amongst a community is different. We will look at examples of various scripts, including Garay and others, and think together about the research, community outreach, design and development required, and the sociopolitical dynamics that can affect those efforts. The presentations will be followed by Q & A, open discussion and, if desired, critiques of tutorial participants’ projects in this vein.