The ascendancy of the Cham script: how a literacy workshop became the catalyst
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Doris E. Blood
Abstract
This article focuses on the Eastern Cham of Vietnam, who have an ancient script descended from Sanskrit, the result of contact with Hindu grammarians in the second century. The author and her husband came to the Cham area in the 1960s and found the ancient script was prestigious but essentially useless since only the old men knew the script and it was not used for communication in the culture. The introduction of romanized primers for a headstart grade in Cham schools brought much opposition, which also renewed interest in the Cham script. In choosing the traditional script for their language in the 1970s, the Eastern Cham people revealed that their script is an important visible evidence of their distinctiveness as a unique people.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- The sociolinguistics of script choice: an introduction
- Writing Tuareg — the three script options
- The Khom script of the Kommodam Rebellion
- A social orthography of identity: the N'ko literacy movement in West Africa
- The ascendancy of the Cham script: how a literacy workshop became the catalyst
- Missionary contributions toward the revaluation of Hangeul in late nineteenth-century Korea
- Choosing how to write sign language: a sociolinguistic perspective
- Indexicality, voice, and context in the distribution of Cherokee scripts
- Script change in Azerbaijan: acts of identity
- Script selection for Tibetan-related languages in multiscriptal environments
- Nonconventional script choice in Japan
- Script choice among the Miao in China
- Emblems of independence: script choice in post-Soviet Turkmenistan
- Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, edited by Seth L. Sanders
