Tim Brookes

Tim Brookes

Executive Director

Endangered Alphabets

Born in the UK and educated at Oxford, Tim Brookes moved to Vermont in 1980 and founded the Endangered Alphabets Project in 2013 as a federal nonprofit. Nowadays everyone knows that many of the world’s languages are in danger of dying out, but there is almost no recognition that more than 85% of the world’s scripts are also threatened. When a culture is forced to abandon its traditional writing, its entire written record — literature, sacred texts, personal correspondence, legal documents, histories — becomes incomprehensible within two generations, and with it the culture’s sense of history, purpose, dignity, and identity is lost. The Endangered Alphabets Project is the only organization in the world working to discover, research, and document minority scripts, and then supporting efforts to revitalize these scripts, and thereby their languages and their cultures of origin.