My Ancestors' Alphabet Just Became Code

Here's a thing engineers know and everyone else is happily spared: the letters on this screen aren't letters. They're numbers. Behind every character is a code point — A is U+0041, and so on — entries in a giant shared table called Unicode that lets every device on earth agree on what a given number should draw. It is one of the quietly great achievements of computing: a single map of nearly every symbol humans write.

And here is the brutal corollary, the one I feel in my chest as someone from Tulu Nadu: if your script isn't in that table, it does not digitally exist. You can't type it. You can't search it. You can't put it in a filename, a message, a database, a webpage. In the twenty-first century, a script that hasn't been encoded isn't merely old-fashioned — it's invisible, and invisibility is how writing systems quietly die.

For most of my life, that was the exact status of my own ancestral script.

A script that died the first time

Tulu — my mother tongue's cousin, the language of my coast — was not always written in the Kannada letters it uses today. Its own traditional script is Tigalari: a Southern Brahmic script descended from Grantha, in use from around the 8th–9th century, once used to write Sanskrit, Kannada and Tulu alike, preserved for centuries on palm-leaf manuscripts.^[1] I wrote about it in the broader Tulunad Heritage piece; here I want to tell the part that undoes me a little.

Tigalari died once already. When printing arrived, it never made the leap to type; presses and missionaries set Tulu in the Kannada script instead, and the old letters slid out of use — not with a decree, just with disuse, surviving as bundles of palm leaves in old houses that fewer and fewer people could read.^[1] A whole way of writing became a thing your grandfather owned and you couldn't.

An unread manuscript is a hard drive with no reader left. The data survives; the ability to open it does not. My heritage had a storage-format problem centuries before I'd have the words for it.

The unglamorous heroism of a code point

So how does an almost-dead alphabet get a second life? Not with a viral moment. With paperwork — years of it — which is the part I find genuinely moving.

The long campaign to bring Tulu-Tigalari into Unicode was led in large part by a typeface designer, Vaishnavi Murthy, across the better part of two decades — an effort she began as a graphic-design student.^[2] She grew up visiting her grandfather's 500-year-old home in Mangaluru, its shelves lined with palm-leaf manuscripts in the very script she'd spend eighteen years fighting to save.^[2] A first preliminary proposal went to Unicode in 2011; it wasn't comprehensive enough. What followed was the slow, exacting work standards actually require — linguists and script experts (Vinodh Rajan among them) reconciling archaic letterforms across Tulu, Kannada and Sanskrit manuscripts, revised proposals in 2021 and 2022, even a debate over what to call it.^[3][4]

I have spent my career around exactly this kind of work — specs, proposals, committees, the endless patient argument to get a standard right so that everyone downstream can just use it and never think about it. It is the least celebrated work in technology. And here it was, aimed not at a payment protocol or a file format, but at rescuing letters. Someone did the boring, heroic thing for an alphabet.

The milestone: in 2024, the Tulu-Tigalari script was formally added to Unicode 16.0, assigned the code-point block U+11380–U+113FF.^[1] After that, my ancestors' letters are no longer just marks on palm leaf. They are a permanent, standardised part of the alphabet of every computer on the planet.

The strangest resurrection

There's a detail here that reads like poetry to me. Tigalari originally wrote Sanskrit and Kannada more than it wrote Tulu. It fell almost entirely out of use. And now it is being brought back specifically to revive a different language — Tulu — to the point that it's increasingly just called Tulu Lipi, "the Tulu script."^[3] A dead alphabet, re-pointed at a living language it barely used to serve. Scripts, it turns out, can be refactored.

The honest part: encoded is not alive

I'd be breaking my own rule if I ended on triumph, because being in Unicode is necessary, not sufficient. A code point is an address, not a life. For most people the letters still won't render — the fonts are rare, keyboards rarer, and the number of people who can actually read Tigalari is smaller than the number who now technically could type it. In software terms: we got the protocol standardised, and the implementation is barely started.

That's why the encoding matters and also why it isn't the finish line. Unicode makes the revival possible — fonts, input methods, digitised manuscripts, the script being taught again in schools across the coast can now all point at the same shared standard.^[1] But possible is not done. The letters still need people willing to learn them. Standards give you the road; someone still has to walk it.

Why this one got to me

I write software for a living. I deal in encodings and code points and standards on ordinary Tuesdays, and they almost never move me. This one did.

Because for once the thing being encoded was mine — the marks on my grandparents' generation's palm leaves, the script behind the language of my home, handed a permanent seat at the table where the world keeps its writing. The most affecting piece of engineering I encountered this year wasn't a framework or a model. It was roughly eighty numbers, argued into existence over eighteen years, that let a nearly-dead alphabet be typed again.

We usually think digitising something drains the life from it. Once in a while, it's the opposite — the only thing that lets it live at all.

This is the exact seam where my two worlds meet: the coast I come from and the systems I build. I left one to work in the other. It's a quiet joy to find that, just occasionally, the second can reach back and save something in the first.

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Sources & references

1. Wikipedia — "Tigalari script" and "Tulu-Tigalari (Unicode block)." (Brahmic origin; decline under printing; Unicode 16.0, block U+11380–U+113FF; school revival)
2. Rest of World — "Forget emoji, the real Unicode drama is over an endangered Indian script." (Vaishnavi Murthy's ~18-year campaign; her grandfather's palm-leaf manuscripts)
3. Nishant Ratnakar / Solmelu — "Tulu language, Tulu Script, and its Unicode"; and the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets — "Tigalari-Tulu." (the script reviving a different language; "Tulu Lipi")
4. Unicode Consortium — "Updated proposal to encode Tulu-Tigalari script in Unicode" (L2/21-210). (the technical proposal itself; contributors and letterform unification)