The world has between 6,000 and 7,000 languages, but as many as half of them will be extinct by the end of this century. Another and even more dramatic way in which this cultural diversity is shrinking concerns the alphabets in which those languages are written.

Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000-7,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. Moreover, at least a third of the world’s remaining alphabets are endangered–-no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, understood only by a few elders, restricted to a few monasteries or used only in ceremonial documents, magic spells, or secret love letters.

Tim Brookes researches languages on the brink of being completely forgotten, and he’s here to break them down and store them up with his Endangered Alphabets project. Brookes carves and paints near-extinct writing systems from Indonesia, Nigeria, and beyond into wood, and he’s planning a traveling exhibition to preserve these scripts and the fascinating cultures they embody.