Decolonising Literacy: The determinants of success for indigenous writing systems

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For centuries, colonial and missionary powers have provided writing systems for traditionally unwritten languages (Hovdhaugen 1996). The Roman and Cyrillic alphabets poorly represent many of the hundreds of languages for which foreign missionaries and governments have deployed them (Sassoon 2004), without due regard for their phonology, morphology, or sociolinguistic situation. Reacting against this, many indigenous peoples have invented their own writing systems (Schmitt 1980). I propose to investigate the factors that lead to the decolonisation and success of scripts invented by native speakers in different parts of the world: Africa, China, and India. The systems to be investigated (Mwangwego and Luo Lakeside; Bouyei, Yi, and Zhuang; Kupia and Wancho) were nearly all developed for languages also written in the Latin alphabet. Yet the Latin alphabet was rejected by community language leaders in favour of writing systems that they felt responded better to their needs. At a time when community engagement is becoming more crucial to stem the tide of language endangerment, and in which technology makes the invention and use of new writing systems more viable, it is crucial to understand what drives the success of community-invented, decolonised writing systems. My study will address the complex issues involved through a combination of qualitative sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and quantitative grammatical investigations. The study expands on Cahill and Rice's (2014), Jones and Mooney's (2017), Brookes and Crystal's (2010) and Kelly's (2016) and (2018) works on orthography development for endangered languages and the study of endangered scripts. Much of the study will also touch on Kelly's (2019) analytical dimensions of the rise of writing in West Africa. Furthermore, this study may contribute to the field of grapholinguistics and be presented at the biannual workshops for the Association for Written Language and Literacy, and the Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century Conference. Below, I first outline my research hypotheses, I then discuss the writing systems I will examine, and then review the methods my investigation will use.