G21C (Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century), also known as /gʁafematik/, is a biennial academic conference that convenes scholars from disciplines engaged with grapholinguistics and, more broadly, the systematic study of writing systems and their manifestation in written communication. The conference seeks to examine the current state of scholarship in this domain and to assess the significance of writing and writing systems within adjacent disciplines, including computer science, communication studies, linguistics, typography, psychology, and pedagogy. Of particular concern is the investigation of the expanding influence of Unicode and its implications for the future of literacy and textual practices in human societies.

Reflecting the diversity of scholarly perspectives on writing systems, G21C is fundamentally interdisciplinary in orientation. The conference welcomes submissions from researchers across information technology, language and communication studies, graphic communication, and the social sciences.

G21C endeavors to establish a forum for discourse on the varied approaches to writing systems, with particular emphasis on fostering dialogue between linguistic, informatic, and other disciplinary frameworks. The conference provides a venue for scholarly inquiry into terminology, methodology, and theoretical paradigms relevant to the delineation of an emerging interdisciplinary research area that intersects with substantial practical developments in writing system implementation.

The Theme: Entangled Scripts, Cultures, Disciplines

Entanglement operates at multiple levels in the study of writing. Scripts may be entangled within a single writing system—as in Japanese—or across different languages and, therefore, writing systems, as seen in multilingual documents and public signage. Such entanglements raise fundamental questions: How do scripts/writing systems interact graphically, linguistically, and semiotically?

Because scripts carry the cultural histories of the writing systems that use or have used them, script entanglement often triggers cultural entanglement. Yet the relationship is not unidirectional. Two cultures coexisting in shared physical or virtual spaces may deploy their respective scripts as markers of distinct identity—using writing not to entangle but to disentangle, to assert boundaries rather than dissolve them.

The concept of entanglement extends beyond scripts themselves. Since its inception in 2018, the /gʁafematik/ conference has demonstrated that grapholinguistics is inherently entangled with multiple disciplines: linguistics, naturally, as its parent field, but also history, archaeology, paleography, typography, computer science, artificial intelligence, psychology, education sciences, and others. These disciplines do not merely coexist within the conference’s knowledge domain—they reach toward one another, interweaving their methods and insights in the study of that profoundly human act: reading and writing.

For the fifth iteration of /gʁafematik/, it is time to foreground and examine these three levels of entanglement: within writing systems, between cultures, and across disciplines.

The Term “Grapholinguistics”

Regarding the term “grapholinguistics,” it should be noted that this nomenclature represents established scholarly usage rather than neologism. The term first appeared in 1967 and was formally introduced with its current definition in 2015 by Martin Neef. It constitutes a direct translation of the German term Schriftlinguistik. The formation follows established precedent in linguistic terminology, wherein Greek neoclassical elements are prefixed to "linguistics"—notable examples include “psycholinguistics” and “neurolinguistics,” with additional instances such as “xenolinguistics,” “biolinguistics,” and “cryptolinguistics.”

Endorsers and Sponsors

The Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century Conference receives endorsement from the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI).

The first edition of G21C was held in Brest, France, on June 14–15, 2018, the second edition was held online on June 17–19, 2020, the third edition of G21C was held in Palaiseau, on June 8–10, 2022, and the fourth edition of G21C was held in Venice, on October 23–25, 2024.

Sponsored by IMT Atlantique and LabSTICC CNRS laboratory (UMR 6285)

June 24th, 2026

• 08:50-09:00 BST Conference Opening Greetings
• 09:00-10:00 BST Keynote Presentation:
  Amalia Gnanadesikan (University of Maryland College Park, US). — A Philographer’s Manifesto: How and Why a Linguist Studies Writing Systems
  
  Increasingly, writing is accepted as a true modality of language, one that sits at the intersection of human instinct and technology. The relationship of writing to the primary modalities of language is complex: writing expresses language; it fossilizes language; it analyses language; it influences both lay and specialist perceptions of language; and it uses the building blocks of language in its construction. This talk will discuss evidence for these properties of writing and place them in the context of what the goals of grapholinguistics are and should be.
• 10:00-10:30 BST Coffee break

June 24th, 2026 / SESSION A

• 10:30-11:00 BST
  Dimitrios Meletis. — When Explanations Don’t Compete: What We Miss When We Study Writing Through a Single Lens
  
   
• 11:00-11:30 BST
  Mary C. Dyson (University of Reading, UK). — The roots, branches, and buds of psychotypography
  
  In this talk, I consider whether a field of study labelled psychotypography has developed with its roots in reading hygiene (legibility) which has grown into a bushy tree with various entangled branches and buds awaiting further development. From a multidisciplinary literature review and analytical framework I will identify: research topics, methods and context; contributing disciplines and collaborations; patterns of citations; and possibly uneven growth. I question whether psychotypography is a subfield of psychology or of typography (typopsychology?) and hope to stimulate discussion as to how psychotypography might fit into the larger field of grapholinguistics.
• 11:30-12:00 BST
  Daniel Harbour. — How Alice Kober would have deciphered Linear B
  
   
• 12:00-12:30 BST
  Anushah Hossain, Johannes Bergerhausen and Thomas Huot-Marchand. — A Text Processing Theory of Script
  
   
• 12:30-14:00 BST Lunch break
• 14:00-14:30 BST
  Hana Jee (Languages and Linguistics, York St John University, York, UK). — Universal Emergence and Divergent Pathways as Two Forces Shaping Grapho-Phonemic Systematicity
  
  Writing systems were long assumed arbitrary, yet they display grapho-phonemic systematicity (measurable correlations between letter shapes and sounds). Computational analyses show this systematicity emerging universally across independently evolved scripts, absent only in fictional ones, while cross-cultural experiments reveal that literate adults universally prefer topologically transparent mappings regardless of native orthography. Each writing system achieves systematicity through divergent metrics shaped by distinct cultural and historical pressures. These findings illuminate the bidirectional relationship between cultural artifacts and cognition, suggesting modern educational frameworks emphasizing proportional reasoning shape how humans mentally represent linguistic symbols.
• 14:30-15:00 BST
  Sreeniketh Vogoti. — Formalizing Graphetics through a Grapheme-to-String Generative Grammar
  
   
• 15:00-15:30 BST
  Jenna Sorjonen. — Towards third-wave orthography development?
  
   
• 15:30-16:00 BST
  Dilek Nur Ünsür (Department of Graphics, Necmettin Erbakan University, Turkey). — Script Reform as an Analytical Laboratory: Entanglement, Disentanglement, and the Temporal Limits of Standardisation
  
  This paper examines the Turkish Latin alphabet reform of 1928 as a process of script entanglement and negotiated standardisation rather than a sudden and complete rupture with the Ottoman Turkish in Arabic letters. Focusing on newspapers and magazines published during the transition period, it analyses how competing typographic conventions, orthographic instability, and material constraints shaped the adoption of the new Latin-based alphabet in print. Through a grapholinguistic and typographic analysis, the study argues that standardisation emerged gradually through everyday practices of writing, typesetting, and page design rather than through policy alone.
• 16:00-16:30 BST Coffee break
• 16:30-17:00 BST
  Tianyi Wang, Liory Fern-Pollak and Jackie Masterson (University College London, UK). — Cross-Linguistic Similarity in Cognitive Predictors of Reading and Spelling
  
  This review synthesises evidence on shared and distinct cognitive mechanisms underpinning reading and spelling development across alphabetic and logographic (Chinese) orthographies. Findings indicate that phonological awareness and rapid automatised naming are critical predictors of early literacy (ages 6 to 9), while visual attention span, a measure of orthographic processing, becomes the dominant predictor in older children (10+). This developmental shift from phonological to orthographic processing appears robust across writing systems of varying transparency. The synthesis highlights implications for cross-linguistic literacy assessment, diagnosis of reading difficulties, and evidence-based intervention design.
• 17:00-17:30 BST
  Marta Guidotti*, Christopher Patzanovsky†, Dirk Valkenborg†, and Ann Bessemans*, where *=READSEARCH @ Hasselt University, PXL University of applied sciences and arts, Belgium and †=Data Science Institute, Hasselt University, Belgium. — The visual dimension of language via typographic rhythms
  
  Letters, counters, diacritics, and word length are among the 34 features that define language rhythm diversity in the Latin script. Typographic rhythm is the alternation of black letters and white spaces and, when well-balanced, stabilizes the reading process through periodicity. In a context where legibility research and layout software lack language-specific studies and configurations, this research offers a method to approach language diversity by accessing its design features, crucial for typographic rhythm. Statistical methodologies, including feature ranking and cluster profiling revealed the topological, geometric, and orthographic descriptors that construct language groups, situating rhythm within machine learning, perception, history, geography, and legibility.
• 17:30-18:00 BST
  James Myers (National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan). — Glyph structure: A prosodic/segmental/featural framework
  
  Current analyses of basic graphic forms, here called glyphs, tend to focus on just one writing system or to under-/overgenerate glyph inventories. These analyses can be reconceived in terms of a framework inspired by the study of spoken and signed phonology, with distinct levels for prosody (global and local position), segments (substrokes), and features (substroke properties). Undergeneration and overgeneration are reduced via constraints inherited from their phonological analogs. The framework seems to work well for writing systems of a wide variety of types, while also providing guidance for future research.

June 24th, 2026 / SESSION Β

• 10:30-11:00 BST
  James Victor Gaultney (SIL Global & University of Reading, UK). — The future of italic as an integral part of language in the Latin script and beyond
  
  The italic style has been a part of Latin-script writing systems—and languages that use them—for over five centuries. Despite technological constraints the style has flourished and continues to have a vital role in many Latin-script language communities. This talk explores the historical evolution and current roles of italic and its potential future place in our written languages. It also raises important questions regarding the application of this style to languages that use other scripts and writing systems, particularly in the context of increasingly entangled digital cultures.
• 11:00-11:30 BST
  Lu Xia. — Typographic Mimicry: Navigating Script Entanglement and Cultural Connotation in Graphic Design
  
   
• 11:30-12:00 BST
  Sunan Okura (Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany). — Blackletter and Roman Typefaces in Berlin’s Public Space: Dual Semiotic Functions of “Digraphomorphs” in the First Half of the 20th Century
  
  In contemporary Germany, Blackletter typefaces are often associated with tradition and right-wing politics. However, the question arises as to whether these associations were always present. This study investigates the use of typefaces in early 20th-century Berlin by examining photographic archives and contemporary written sources. Drawing on the concept of digraphia, the term “digraphomorphs” is employed to describe the coexistence of two typefaces within a single script system. The analysis found that Blackletter was rare in urban streetscapes despite its prominence in printed materials. It is proposed that Blackletter carried dual semiotic meanings, functioning differently across political and commercial contexts.
• 12:00-12:30 BST
  Pere Farrando Canals (Shifta by Elisava, Barcelona). — Typography, daughter of writing
  
  The speech proposes a definition of ‘typography’ based on four components: writing, typeface, composition and editing conventions. Each component is in turn defined in an itemized fashion, which later allows for hypertextual (or mind-mapping) links (for instance, Writing 1 <> Editing 4). The four components of typography work as a method to specify the category of ‘typographic object’. Moreover, the whole organic view of typography is postulated as a good premise for academic research.
• 12:30-14:00 BST Lunch break
• 14:00-14:30 BST
  Radek Łukasiewicz. — Lettering as a form of expression in the culture of shortages
  
   
• 14:30-15:00 BST
  Kevin Graaf. — Digital Typography in a Multiscriptal World: Towards Fully Programmable Fonts
  
   
• 15:00-15:30 BST
  Shani Avni. — Making Jewish Typography Discoverable: Notes from the Field (RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection)
  
  The history of Jewish typography remains under-studied, hindered by primary source scarcity, plus a lack of systematic analysis and absence of dedicated academic programs. To address these lacunae, this presentation proposes a working framework for Jewish descriptive bibliography. The combination of visual analysis of typographic evidence with comparative models drawn from palaeography, epigraphy, and typeface design research can address gaps where historical documentation is incomplete or absent. Filling in typographic gaps will allow for insights into Jewish printing, through which we can better understand the circumstances, limitations, and perception of information, allowing for its more reliable and accurate interpretation.
• 15:30-16:00 BST
  Liron Turkenich. — When Frank Rühl Met Monotype: One Hebrew Typeface’s Story of Composition Compromises Across the Decades
  
  How does a typeface survive the transition from one technology to another and at what cost? What is lost forever and what is carried over when technological borders are pushed and crossed? This talk examines the adaptation of Frank Rühl, the highly popular Hebrew typeface in current use, from its original 1910 foundry type to Monotype hot-metal type casting technology. Frank Rühl’s transformation offers a rich case study where technological progress is used as a lens through which intersecting scripts, cultures, and disciplines are explored and show how type is shaped by technological constraints, commercial imperatives, and cross-cultural dialogues.
• 16:00-16:30 BST Coffee break
• 16:30-17:00 BST
  Irma Puskarevic. — Writing into visibility: Literacy and the Women’s Antifascist Front
  
   
• 17:00-17:30 BST
  Bríd-Áine Parnell (University of Edinburgh, UK). — Encoded erasure: Legacy technologies, identity, and the fight for the Irish fada
  
  The entanglement of script, language and culture is today further complicated by the digital world, where graphemic representation is shaped and constrained in unforeseen ways. Thinking with Irish names using the síneadh fada diacritic, I examine digital name misrepresentation through Anglicisation and the weight of inertia in technological infrastructures. Through a mixed-methods analysis of a survey of users, I make connections between Ireland's historic colonialism and the soft-power coloniality of the Anglocentric digital world of today, whose linguistic imperialism construes some as citizens and others always at one remove.
• 17:30-18:00 BST
  Ring Yong. — Writing towards printing: The Formation of Chinese Typographical Infrastructures in the Early 19th century
  
   

June 25th, 2026

• 09:00-10:00 BST Keynote Presentation:
  Adam Jaworski (University of Hong Kong, China). — Sculptural Place Names: Between Elitism and Egalitarianism in High-Value Urban Spaces
  
  Sculptural place names are large, typically human size, free standing, three-dimensional letter forms designating cities, countries, and other locations. They are commonly found in high value, gentrifying urban areas, or transportation hubs associated with social mobility and elite lifestyles. Yet, their street-level emplacement and accessibility allow public easy engagement: sitting, climbing, and ubiquitous photo-taking. Thus, sculptural place names present a paradox, on the one hand, signifying distinction, while on the other, inviting ludic performances of place. The presentation, developed in collaboration with Tong King Lee, explores this paradox by engaging in a social semiotic analysis of emplacement, three-dimensionality, and typography. It starts with the emergence of text-based public art as an urban genre, then it examines the meaning potentials of sculptural place names through their materiality, multimodal design, and embodied performances of visitors interacting with these language objects. Finally, it is proposed that sculptural place names be seen as a means of mediation of (aspirational) elitism and (pragmatic) egalitarianism, with implications for how we understand place-making, regeneration, and gentrification.
• 10:00-10:30 BST Coffee break

June 25th, 2026 / SESSION A

• 10:30-11:00 BST
  Philippa Steele (University of Cambridge). — From linguistic to material approaches: interdisciplinary entanglement in studying writing direction
  
  This paper aims to widen the scope of research on directionality in writing by introducing more inclusive and diachronic angles to its study, identifying a broad interdisciplinary remit for research and thereby highlighting the entanglement of linguistic, cognitive, social and material factors involved. While previous studies have concentrated largely on cognitive, psychological and neurological factors in well established literacies, far less attention has been paid to the emergence of directionality features within writing traditions. Two issues are chosen as theoretical case studies: the relationship between directionality and encoding grain size, and the possible motivation for historical shifts in writing direction.
• 11:00-11:30 BST
  Yu Li (Loyola Marymount University). — Graphematic Chineseness as Intertextual Discourse in the West
  
  This project examines the long historical production of “Chineseness” through graphematic forms in Western contexts, arguing that Chinese characters, pseudo-characters, and Chinese-mimicking Latin letterforms should be understood not as isolated stylistic inventions, but as an intertextual discourse that has unfolded, sedimented, and reactivated across centuries. The empirical material examined includes early modern European writings on China, Chinoiserie architectural and decorative arts, nineteenth-century Euro-American political cartoons, and contemporary deployments of the “chop suey” lettering style. The study conceptualizes graphematic Chineseness as a repertoire of recurring grapholinguistic citations through which Western societies have continuously imagined, negotiated, and contested China as an Other.
• 11:30-12:00 BST
  Keith Murphy. — Unicode and the Resolution of Chaos into Order
  
   
• 12:00-12:30 BST
  Yue Chen. — Establishing comparable writing units in a non-unified writing system: a grapholinguistic approach based on ideographic Yi
  
   
• 12:30-14:00 BST Lunch break
• 14:00-14:30 BST
  Paul Ueda. — Encoding, Input, and Power: Digitally-disadvantaged languages and standardization
  
   
• 14:30-15:00 BST
  Chao Li (College of Staten Island, City University of New York, US). — The Classification of the Chinese Writing System and Its Implication for Writing System Typology
  
  The Chinese writing system is often classified quite differently by different researchers. This paper argues that the Chinese writing system has both a semantic basis and a phonological basis and that it should be classified as a syllabic-semantic system. Given that a satisfactory classification of the Chinese writing system needs to take into consideration both the phonological and the semantic dimension, this paper also proposes that a sound classification of writing systems require considerations of both of these two dimensions, and it provides a typology of writing systems along this line.
• 15:00-15:30 BST
  Niaz Mirmobini, Nadine Chahine and Ann Bessemans. — Implementing Arabic Ligatures to calibrate the Visual Complexity degree in Text Rhythm: A Foundation of Future Legibility Research
  
   
• 15:30-16:00 BST
  Hanan Alshawi. — Arabic dominance and latin presence in Saudi print (Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, UK)
  
  Printed communication is shaped not only by language but also by the visual organisation of scripts and the material conditions of print production. This talk examines the interaction between Arabic and Latin scripts in professionally printed materials produced in Saudi Arabia between 1900 and 2020. Drawing on newspapers, advertisements, magazines, and institutional publications, it argues that script relations were constructed through hierarchy, typographic scale, spatial organisation, and audience expectations. The presentation approaches printed materials as forms of visual evidence shaped by local printing technologies and institutional demands. It presents a synchronoptic timeline and annotated visual examples to discuss script interaction across professional practice and technological change.
• 16:00-16:30 BST Coffee break
• 16:30-17:00 BST
  Jo Dichy. — The grammatisation of Arabic::writing entangled with morphological and lexical structures
  
   
• 17:00-17:30 BST
  Guy Boursier (Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, IREMAM, Aix-en-Provence, France). — Script Entanglements in Egyptian Arabic
  
  Many authors writing in the Egyptian Arabic dialect feel freer than those writing in Modern Standard Arabic to use graphs other than those of the canonical Arabic alphabet. Some resort to letters that originally appeared in the Persian alphabet, to transcribe marginal sounds. Others go so far as to write words or phrases in the Latin script within Arabic sentences. These entanglements of different alphabets and scripts contrast with the practices of other countries and reveal that the authors have specific expectations of their readership.
• 17:30-18:00 BST
  Mohammad Ali Jalal Yaghan. — With Arabic: Bilingual vs. Entanglement
  
  This paper explores the Arabic language, script, and culture across fourteen centuries, focusing on how Arabic has intersected with other traditions. Beyond acting as a primary component in bilingual, trilingual, or polyglot documents, Arabic has deeply entangled with other languages, shaping new cultural and subgroup identities. This concept of entanglement is extended through two contemporary innovations: Vertical Arabic Writing and New Islamic Patterns. The former fosters cross-cultural alignment with Eastern vertical scripts, leveraging psychological links between writing direction and cognition. The latter introduces a new visual art genre that seamlessly integrates multiple languages, exemplified here by a six-language composition of “peace”.

June 25th, 2026 / SESSION Β

• 10:30-11:00 BST
  Arvind Iyengar. — Typological metamorphosis in abugidas and alphasyllabaries
  
   
• 11:00-11:30 BST
  Chathurangi De Silva. — Collective Storytelling for Heritage City Branding Lessons from the Anuradhapura Design Project
  
   
• 11:30-12:00 BST
  Xicheng Yang (Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, UK). — From archival forms to digital typeface: a systematic framework for reviving extinct sinoform scripts — the Tangut case
  
  How can the digital revival of extinct writing systems maintain structural and historical integrity? Using the Tangut script as a primary case study, this presentation introduces a design-oriented framework termed contextual multi-level analysis to translate archival forms into systematic typographic representations. Integrating comparative writing-system analysis, tool-based micro-analysis, and multi-script typographic contexts, the framework systematically derives design parameters from historical sources. Through the development of the TangutBux typeface as a methodological proof-of-concept , the session demonstrates a repeatable workflow for translating archival forms into functional digital typefaces.
• 12:00-12:30 BST
  Alice Mazzilli (independent artist and researcher). — Writing as Entanglement: Interoception, World-Making, and the Ecology of writing
  
  This paper develops Interowriting and Interosigns as a practice-based framework grounded in interoception, understood as an entangled process in which bodily, environmental, and relational dynamics co-constitute experience. Within this framework, the paper positions Interowriting as a response to the historical stabilisation of language and writing. Reading and writing are no longer separable functions but part of a continuous feedback loop in which affect and inter-action co-constitute one another. From this process emerge Interosigns as dynamic material-semiotic configurations. Interowriting thus reframes writing as a generative, accessible process through which individuals and collectives participate in the active composition, and contestation of meaning and reality.
• 12:30-14:00 BST Lunch break
• 14:00-14:30 BST
  Nicolas Ballier, Behnoosh Namdarzadeh and Taylor Arnold. — Disentangling scripts and language representations in the Whisper multilingual model
  
   
• 14:30-15:00 BST
  David Březina (Rosetta Type). — Searching for universal principles in world scripts, now with Fourier transform
  
  This paper proposes a perceptual approach to graphemic analysis using the Fourier transform as a complement to studies based on the annotation of high-level features or production techniques. A prototype focusing primarily on dominant visual angles and automated stroke counts shows promise, although it is not yet fully discriminative with respect to character identity. The approach is culturally agnostic, scalable, and technology-independent, with potential applications in epigraphy and multi-script typeface design.
• 15:00-15:30 BST
  Marc Wilhelm Küster. — Writing Systems as Cultural Maps: Semantic Alignment in Script Transfer
  
   
• 15:30-16:00 BST
  Ann Bessemans. — An architecture of legibility. Mapping typographic visibility to modern reading strategies.
  
   
• 16:00-16:30 BST Coffee break
• 16:30-17:00 BST
  Bethany E. Qualls (Université de Caen Normandie, France). — Tangled up in Audio: Unseen Scripts, Shifting Affordances, and Modes of Typographic Design Histories
  
  Kate Brideau notes how typography often becomes “invisible” when we read. But what happens when texts shift into multimodal forms without visual elements? Using the independently produced podcast Re(un)Covered as a springboard, I consider how graphic design and typography history can shift into audio without immediate access to their visuals. I argue such shifts in form, mode, and audience reach wider publics. Along with some resulting affordances and challenges, we’ll see how wider accessibility of seemingly “niche” historical content (e.g., early 20th-century women hot metal type designers) builds a more complete picture of design’s past and present.
• 17:00-17:30 BST
  Sherry Muyuan He. — Investigating Typographic Proximities Among Geographically or Chronologically Distant Scripts
  
  Over the past decade, non-Latin typography publications have expanded from Arabic, Indic, and CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) scripts to lesser-known writing systems. Geographically close scripts are often researched together. For example, Southeast Asian scripts like Thai, Khmer, and Burmese are grouped due to shared features like complex vowel placements. This paper explores similarities among scripts that are geographically distant and seldom analyzed altogether. Sections include Arabic dots and Japanese kana dakuten in terms of shape, position, and color; the starting point and the acceptance of simplified Malayalam and simplified Chinese; regionally prioritized alternates in Devanagari and Cyrillic.
• 17:30-18:00 BST
  Sumanthri Samarawickrama. — Script-Sensitive Typographic Classification of Visual Structures in Sinhala Newspaper Titles
  
   

June 26th, 2026

• 09:00-10:00 BST Keynote Presentation:
  Zanna van Loon (Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp, Belgium). — How material forms shape early modern missionary linguistic knowledge
  
  Knowledge moves through different media—oral, visual, and material—each shaping its durability, shape, and transferability. In the early modern Spanish viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, missionary grammars, vocabularies, and devotional translations were central tools for codifying Indigenous languages and transmitting the Catholic doctrine. These books, whether handwritten or printed, were not static carriers of linguistic knowledge, but dynamic objects whose form and function were determined by social, material, and spatial processes. This talk underscores that no text exists outside its material support, and that understanding missionary books codifying Indigenous languages requires attention to these books as physical and cultural objects, made by a network of human actors working with particular materials and techniques in particular places, and dependent on local conditions and possibilities.
• 10:00-10:30 BST Coffee break

June 26th, 2026 / SESSION A

• 10:30-11:00 BST
  Helen Magowan. — Disentangling Masculinity, Femininity and Chineseness in Japanese Script (the first thousand years)
  
   
• 11:00-11:30 BST
  Keisuke Honda (Dublin City University, Ireland). — Representing light syllables in Japanese braille and kana: Implications for grapholinguistics
  
  There is a growing recognition that braille is functionally equivalent to print in materialising writing systems. However, the modal distinction between tactile and visual representation results in important differences in the formation and arrangement of individual signs, which remain underexplored in the print-dominant grapholinguistic tradition. The present paper highlights this point through a comparative analysis of Japanese braille and kana. Focusing on the representation of light syllables in both systems, it identifies key constraints present in the former but absent in the latter. The paper explores the implications of such constraints for the descriptive and comparative analysis of writing systems.
• 11:30-12:00 BST
  Thomas Phillip Hinrichs (Faculty of East Asian Studies, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany). — Layered Expression: Exploring the Formal Limits of Rubi in Contemporary Japanese
  
  Japanese rubi glosses conventionally serve as a reading aid, clarifying logographic writing through a phonographic gloss. More marginally, they are also employed more creatively: When the gloss introduces unambiguously new linguistic material, it creates a juxtaposition between two layers of writing. The diversity of such rubi use throughout Japanese literature makes developing frameworks for its analysis difficult, beginning with the fundamental boundaries that define rubi as a device. Through particularly divergent examples from contemporary pop culture—genre novels, comics and video games—and with a focus on semantics, this talk explores what is and isn't possible within Japanese rubi.
• 12:00-12:30 BST
  Irmi Wachendorff (Department of Typography & Graphic Communication. — Entangled histories, divergent readings: Perceptions of blackletter across European contexts
  
  Blackletter carries enormous historical charge. Yet, its meanings are not identical across contexts. What evokes heritage and authenticity in one, can index danger and authoritarian politics in another, or subcultural protest in a third. These divergent readings and layered indexicalities are the starting point for this investigation. Drawing on a pilot study including image data and interviews collected across Berlin, London, and Paris, it examines how perceptions of blackletter differ across national, generational, and professional boundaries; how these perceptions are shaped by local histories of use and stratified graphic knowledge; and considers what this means for typographic meaning-making in contested public spaces.
• 12:30-14:00 BST Lunch break
• 14:00-14:30 BST
  Onna Segev (University of Haifa, Israel). — From Situated to Standardized Urgency: “Now” in Israeli Public Space
  
  The word achshav (now) has been entangled in Israeli public discourse for decades. The study traces its visual configurations, analyzing key artifacts associated with the word’s civic resonance: from its first appearance in the “Peace Now” logotype (1978), through its reemergence in the signs and stickers of the Hostages’ Families campaign (2023), to its use in various protests from 2024–2025, in which achshav is consistently made salient. The study shows how typography operates as a channel of meaning in interaction with other modes of communication, together shaping how urgency is perceived, read, and circulated.
• 14:30-15:00 BST
  Yannis Haralambous (IMT Atlantique, Brest, France) and Keisuke Honda (Dublin City University, Ireland). — French and Pseudo-French Language Used in Japanese Shop Signs and Trademarks
  
  Since the 19th century, French has signified elegance and chic in Japanese public space, appearing in shop signs, trademarks, and product names. Yet a striking trend has emerged: erroneous and sometimes nonsensical “pseudo-French” inscriptions, dubbed franponais. Challenging Blommaert's view that such signs function purely emblematically rather than linguistically, we propose a spectrum between normative and deviant French usage, where deviation may be involuntary or deliberately artistic. Drawing on linguistic landscape and commercial onomastics frameworks, we analyze trademark, OpenStreetMap, and photographic corpora to quantify lexical, semantic, and graphemic correctness, illuminating the true dimensions of this phenomenon.
• 15:00-15:30 BST
  Bojana Damnjanović. — Grapholinguistic Analysis of Protest Signs: Torlak Dialects in Serbia’s Linguistic Landscape
  
   
• 15:30-16:00 BST
  Rawan Abdulmonem M. Almuzaini. — The Functions of Online Trans-scripting: The Views of Saudi Arabic-Roman Biscriptals
  
  Research on online written bilingualism has largely focused on code-switching between languages that share a single script, such as English and French. However, languages written in different scripts, such as Arabic and English, open a new path for understanding bilingualism, particularly through trans-scripting. This presentation investigates the functions of using non-standard script combinations available to Saudi Arabic-Roman biscriptals in online communication. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative questionnaire data, the findings reveal that trans-scripting practices serve functions related to convenience, imitation, creativity, and symbolic self-presentation, highlighting the fluid and meaning- making potential of scripts in digitally mediated bilingual communication.
• 16:00-16:30 BST Coffee break
• 16:30-17:00 BST
  Gordon Berthin (University of Toronto, Canada). — Glyph Redundancy in the Logographic Model of Rongorongo
  
  South Pacific Easter Island’s indigenously developed glyphic rongorongo inscriptions resist decipherment. About one third of the approximately 300 different glyphs are either unique (hapax forms) or confined to a single anecdotal situation. I model rongorongo as a concept-determined semantic logography where complex characters are agglutinates of “base glyphs”. It is hypothesized that these bases provided rudimentary definitions of the complex forms through direct meaning, phonetics, word puzzles, or word pictures, affording a method for indigenous readers to interpret the rare hapaxes whenever they were encountered. Moreover, this interpretive system remains a viable epigraphic aid, even in the present-day.
• 17:00-17:30 BST
  Robert M. Schoch (Boston University, USA) and Tomi S. Melka (Independent researcher, Las Palmas de G.C., Spain). — The authentication of epigraphic rongorongo material: Key problems involved, inconsistencies and ambiguities in the criteria applied, and implications for the field of rongorongo studies
  
  Rongorongo is the classical script of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). We discuss and evaluate the various criteria used by scholars to judge whether a specific rongorongo-bearing piece is considered “authentic”. As a case study, we focus on the “Saint John Mechanics’ Institute [New Brunswick, Canada] rongorongo-inscribed piece”, a slightly flattened sausage-shaped wooden object with tapered ends currently in a private collection that was de-accessioned prior to the dissolution of the Institute in 1890. One side is inscribed with four crude glyphs. A fifth glyph is effaced (burnt and possibly scratched out prior to being burnt).
• 17:30-18:00 BST
  Tomi S. Melka (Independent researcher, Las Palmas de G.C., Spain) and Robert M. Schoch (Boston University, USA). — Linear vs. non-linear rongorongo inscriptions. Dimensionality, contexts of use, expert and inexpert hands, and their relevance for the cultural and epigraphic studies of Easter Island
  
  The majority of the surviving rongorongo corpus is inscribed on tablets and a staff featuring a reasonable number of glyphs, which are linearly rendered or concatenated, most of them following a reverse boustrophedon order. However, there are a number of rongorongo-bearing artifacts that “defy” such linearity, suggestive of the broader social scope of the phenomenon. Regarding the latter, we posit (with examples) that the non-linear information is indicative of a mode of cognition, with the literate or initiated Rapanui having no “trouble” in retrieving the information and “overstepping” the modern “fixed” boundaries of linearity versus non-linearity.

June 26th, 2026 / SESSION Β

• 10:30-11:00 BST
  Saeed Radawi (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies). — Encoding the Rare: Pharyngeals in Writing Systems
  
  In this talk, I examine how rare speech sounds, using pharyngeals as an example, show peculiarities when put into writing. Focusing on four distinct phenomena, I first look into defective scripts (e.g., Hittite, early Aramaic, and Hawar Kurdish) where pharyngeals lack dedicated signs despite being phonemically contrastive. Second, I explore the repurposing of pharyngeal graphemes in scripts like Arabic and Hebrew when adapted for languages lacking these sounds (e.g., Yiddish, Comorian). Third, I discuss etymologizing orthographies like Modern Hebrew and Amharic, which maintain pharyngeal signs for historical or prestige reasons despite phonological neutralization. Finally, I examine "make do" orthographies, such as Arabic internet latinization using numerals, illustrating how speakers creatively bypass standardized limitations to encode these marked sounds.
• 11:00-11:30 BST
  Pule kaJanolintji. — Nzwisiso YemiPanda YemaZita and the “Botho Cycle of Signs”
  
   
• 11:30-12:00 BST
  Erika Sandman (University of Helsinki, Finland). — Entangled scripts in the colloquial writing practices of the Sengge Gshong (Wutun) speakers
  
  Wutun, also known as Sengge Gshong, is a mixed language with Northwest Mandarin lexicon and Amdo Tibetan grammar spoken by ca. 4500 speakers in Qinghai Province, P.R. China. Although the language has no standardized orthography widely used by the community, educated speakers know how to write using the scripts they have learnt at school: Tibetan abugidas, Chinese characters, and Latin alphabet. Sometimes two or all three scripts are used together in the same text. In my talk, I will discuss the colloquial writing practices of Wutun speakers from the perspective of trans-languaging.
• 12:00-12:30 BST
  David Osgarby (University of Glasgow, UK). — How was the Pictish Symbol system created? Grammatogeny in the late antique British Isles
  
  Pictish Symbols are a symbol system preserved on stone monuments carved between the 5th and 9th centuries AD in a large region of modern-day Scotland. Archaeological comparisons show that Pictish Symbols were used in the same contexts as the Latin and ogham scripts in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland. Graphetic comparisons with the structured interrelations of ogham and Hanunóo basic shapes show that the paradigm of abstract Pictish Symbol basic shapes is diagnostic of an abugida. This paper proposes that a likely influence in Pictish Symbol grammatogeny was Late Roman Imperial use of syllabic Tironian notes, which were also abugidic.
• 12:30-14:00 BST Lunch break
• 14:00-14:30 BST
  Vuk-Tadija Barbarić (Institute for the Croatian Language, Zagreb, Croatia). — Operationalising ‘Graphematic Solution Space’ for Searching Historical Latin-Script Texts: A Book-Level Model for Early Croatian Print
  
  This paper proposes a retrieval-oriented, book-level model for searching historical Latin-script texts by operationalising the graphematic solution space (GSS). Grounded in Neef's modular theory of writing systems, the model treats individual early printed books as locally coherent graphematic configurations encoded through explicit, inspectable regular-expression rules. Unlike OCR correction and historical-to-modern normalisation pipelines, the approach performs modern-to-historical graphemic expansion: users query in contemporary standard orthography, and book-specific rules generate historically licensed spelling variants matched against a manually verified plain-text corpus, with no lemmatisation or linguistic annotation required.
• 14:30-15:00 BST
  Hanny Imania (Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, UK). — Visual subordination: hierarchy in the Javanese graphic structure.
  
  The hierarchical nature of Javanese culture extends beyond social and linguistic behaviour into the graphic structure of its writing system. Auxiliary forms called pasangan, for example, are required to retreat beneath the primary character to function, visually embedding hierarchy within the script itself. This subordination has generated different interpretations of how structural logic is implemented in the Javanese script. With the development of typography, however, this spatial arrangement changed through shifts in scale, encoding practices, and even the erasure of the pasangan altogether. This paper explores how graphic forms, cultural value, and technological constraints entangled within the Javanese writing system.
• 15:00-15:30 BST
  Saiya Karamali. — Roman Hindi-Urdu Attitudes and Usage
  
   
• 15:30-16:00 BST
  Yuseon Park (University of Reading, UK). — Multiple voices in the early digitization of Hangeul typefaces
  
  The early digitization of Hangeul typefaces in the 1980s and 1990s developed through multiple technical and institutional approaches. This presentation examines how the script settled into the computer environment across the layers of input, encoding, and rendering, through the work of computer engineers, font companies, individual designers, and language specialists. Several projects brought these actors into the same working environment, producing typefaces that bridged different fields. The cases examined show that the digital Hangeul environment was shaped through encounters across the boundaries that separated different fields of work.
• 16:00-16:30 BST Coffee break
• 16:30-17:00 BST
  Antoine Abi Aad. — From Parallel to Entangled: Biscriptual Visualization of Code-Switching in the UAE
  
   
• 17:00-17:30 BST
  Roman Wilhelm. — Between Languages and Typefaces—Sorbian Letterpress, Typographic Innovation, and its Role in Sorbian Cultural Identity
  
   

The conference will be held in hybrid mode: participants can present and interact in videoconference mode or attend physically. The physical location will be the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication (Whiteknights Campus, Earley Gate), University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom.

Yannis Haralambous, IMT Atlantique & CNRS Lab-STICC, Brest, France
Gerry Leonidas, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, UK
Irmi Wachendorff, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, UK

Submission deadline: January 26th February 5th (Extended), 2026, 23:59 AoE
Notification of acceptance: April 6th, 2026
Pre-conference workshops: June 22–23, 2026
Conference: June 24–26, 2026
Submission of paper for Proceedings: October 5th, 2026

For more information on the conference please visit 

https://grafematik2026.sciencesconf.org
and follow
https://bsky.app/profile/grafematik.bsky.social

To submit a presentation proposal, please connect to EasyChair and provide an extended ANONYMOUS abstract of at least 500 and at most 1,000 words, followed by at least 10 (ten) bibliographical references in a PDF file.

Proposals that do not respect these constraints will not be considered.

Registration for delegates who are not submitting abstracts and for online participants is open at:
https://www.store.reading.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/faculty-of-arts-humanities-social-science/typography-graphic-communication/grapholinguistics-2026
Speakers will be asked to register after the conclusion of the proposal review process.

The Proceedings will be published by Fluxus Editions publishing house (Brest, France) as a volume of the Grapholinguistics and Its Applications Series. Articles in the Proceedings can be 12–60 pages long (LaTeX “article” document class) and can be written in English, French, or German. Instructions can be found here.