Cahill M., Rice K. (eds.) Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages

Dallas: SIL International, 2014. — 278 p.Documentary linguistics was a major theme of the 2010 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), and as I (Cahill) listened to discussions on community involvement, computer technology, dictionaries, methodology, and the occasional passing reference to literacy, it struck me that literacy among endangered languages deserved a more thorough discussion. Orthography seemed to be a manageable piece of that, although when I broached the idea to one linguist at LSA, he reacted with astonishment and disbelief. He had enough experience to know that orthographies are quite complex, not only linguistically but also politically. However, there was so much encouragement from others who felt the time was indeed ripe for this that the two editors of this volume organized an LSA Symposium in 2011 in which several of the papers here were initially presented.
An orthography is a system for representing a language in written form. The first thought that comes to most people's minds is individual characters (graphemes), but an orthography is much more than that. It also includes word breaks, punctuation, diacritics, rules on how to split and hyphenate words at the end of lines, and capitalization, and is sometimes thought to include spelling as well.