A look at the decade long struggle to bring the script of Tulu, an Indian language, into Unicode, and the problem of keeping languages alive in the digital age
Varsha Bansal / Rest of World : Tweets: @xor , @restofworld , @mvzelenks , @restofworld , @restofworld , @cengizyar , @dlberes , @raju , @varshaabansal , and @restofworld Tweets: Parker Higgins / @xor : This is a really fascinating discussion of the kind of hard text encoding question that Unicode should handle. A lot of people have expressed frustration that emoji seems to suck up all the oxygen in the room. https://twitter.com/... @restofworld : For the last decade, groups of linguists, typographers, and academics have worked on competing Unicode proposals to bring Tulu's ancient script into the digital age. @VarshaaBansal reports on why it's been such a tricky undertaking: https://restofworld.org/... Michael Zelenko / @mvzelenks : “Globally, 40% of the over 7,000 languages spoken by humanity are at risk. One way to preserve a language is to ensure it is digitized.” Fascinating reporting here from @VarshaaBansal (with a bonus assist from @dlberes!) https://restofworld.org/... @restofworld @restofworld : At least 40% of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken globally are at risk. In the last century, at least 400 have gone extinct, taking with them stories, cultural traditions, ethnic identities, and a bounty of other information from the past https://restofworld.org/... @restofworld : Read @VarshaaBansal's full story about the debate over digitizing Tulu and how it mirrors a question about all languages: how much should they evolve, and how much should they reflect history? https://restofworld.org/... Cengiz / @cengizyar : One way to preserve a language is to digitize it, so speakers can continue to express themselves. But for languages that don't use Roman script, like Tulu, that's much easier said than done. @VarshaaBansal explains for @restofworld https://restofworld.org/... https://twitter.com/... Damon Beres / @dlberes : The story published today, and it's fantastic. A nuanced exploration of the sometimes extremely complicated intersection of digital life and culture. How do you “standardize” a regional language with diverse grammatical forms, characters, and dialects? https://restofworld.org/... Raju Narisetti / @raju : Also why @Wikipedia matters ever more Tulu is one of 192 languages from India that are considered “in danger” by @UNESCO among imperiled tongues worldwide. Overall, 40% of the 7,000 languages spoken are at risk. https://restofworld.org/... @restofworld Varsha Bansal / @varshaabansal : My latest story for @restofworld is about a decade long struggle to bring Tulu script into Unicode. But it's also about a larger worldwide problem of trying to keep languages alive in a digital age. 192 Indian languages are in danger of disappearing. https://restofworld.org/... @restofworld : The decade-long effort to digitize the Tulu script is a small slice of a much larger worldwide problem. Tulu, which is spoken by around 1.8 million people, might soon disappear: UNESCO identifies it as one of 192 languages from India that are “in danger” https://restofworld.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The fight to encode Tulu follows a playbook proven earlier in 2021, when an open letter to Tim Cook helped bring an Urdu typeface to Apple devices — evidence that individual advocates can move platform vendors when standards work stalls. For Tulu, though, the bottleneck sits upstream: linguists, typographers, and academics have spent a decade submitting competing Unicode proposals, and until one is adopted the language has no canonical digital form at all.
The stakes are existential in scope. UNESCO counts Tulu among 192 endangered Indian languages, and the related coverage traces a widening gap between the world's languages and its software — Wikipedia supports 309 languages while most tools assume far fewer. Encoding the script is the precondition for every later step, from keyboards to the community-built datasets startups like TuluAI are assembling.
First-order effects
- Whichever of the competing Unicode proposals wins determines how millions of potential readers will see the Tulu script rendered across every operating system, font, and app — the proposers are effectively writing the language's digital constitution.
- Until adoption, Tulu speakers are locked out of native text input on phones and computers, pushing daily communication into Roman-script transliteration or other languages.
Second-order effects
- A successful encoding unlocks the downstream stack: keyboards, fonts, searchable archives, and eventually the corpora feeding efforts like TuluAI's community-sourced LLM datasets for low-resource Indian languages.
- Platform vendors face pressure similar to the Apple-Urdu episode to ship Tulu support quickly once Unicode standardizes it, since early adopters of new scripts concentrate among mobile-first users in emerging markets.
Third-order effects
- Standards bodies like Unicode are becoming the de facto gatekeepers of linguistic survival — a language absent from the registry risks the fate researchers are now trying to reverse-engineer with AI on undeciphered scripts like the Indus Valley's.
- If the pattern holds, language preservation shifts from academic documentation projects to a pipeline running through encoding standards, open-source typography, and AI training data, with community involvement as the scarce input.
The trend: Digital language survival increasingly depends on winning adoption in technical standards bodies first, with Unicode encoding acting as the gate that determines whether endangered languages can reach the keyboards, fonts, and AI training sets built afterward.