Mark Jamra 
Neil Patel Usually a script evolves from writing to type, but how do you proceed when you’re asked to provide a calligraphic underpinning to an indigenous script with no calligraphic history, and then develop fonts and utilities for its evolution from abugida to alphabet? This presentation is about the efforts made in onboarding a newly encoded writing system into the digital world. In 2011, the Koinch community of Nepal and the northeastern state of Sikkim in India began working closely with the Script Encoding Initiative and Translation Commons to encode the Sunuwar script. The result was published in the Unicode Standard v16.0 in 2024. This effort eventually became part of the UNESCO International Decade of Indigenous Languages and could become a model for bringing other indigenous scripts into the digital world.
When we received the request to develop Unicode-compliant fonts and utilities such as keyboards and transliteration tools for the community, much of the brief resembled what we’ve done for many African scripts. However, unlike our other work we encountered some unexpected challenges, the first of which was a request from the Sunuwar Welfare Society of Nepal to develop a formal calligraphic basis for a writing system that didn’t have one and to facilitate its use as an alphabet. We will delineate our strategy for doing this and show the feedback from the language community. We’ll also show the complexities and challenges of guiding an indigenous script through a vital transformation in form and digital implementation.