Proposing a Facilitated Participatory Approach for Southeast Asian Minority Language Orthography Design

Abstract

In strongly hierarchical societies, ownership of and involvement in community-related projects often is linked to the social status of individual community members and external specialists, rather than the community as a whole. This paper therefore proposes a hybrid approach to integrate participatory strategies and a significant degree of outsider input in orthography development in Southeast Asian hierarchical societies. Proposing this mixed approach of combining linguistically optimal ‘autonomous’ orthography design and local ownership-oriented participatory methods is based on previously described procedures in orthography development as well as the author’s own observations while consulting on Latin- and Brahmi-based minority language orthographies in Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.