by John Emerson

It’s a humid day in January 1998. A car full of Tai Lüe monks rattles into the checkpoint on the sweltering road between Burma and China. The border guards wave the monks through, heedless of contraband. But hidden in the saffron robes of the passenger in the backseat is a key to the Tai Lüe people’s struggle: a USB thumb drive containing the latest version of the Tai language font.
Like the Kurds, the Tai Lüe lack a country of their own. Spread across southern China, northern Thailand, Burma, and Laos, Tai communities have been repressed for decades, their culture pushed underground as those nations’ regimes have sought control over public expressions of “ethnicity.” But after decades of struggle, Tai culture is experiencing an underground renais-sance, and is flourishing once again. Digital technology—and type, in particular—has enabled this resurgence, reinforcing a cultural community that cuts across national borders.

Type designers know well that context, culture, and history shape the connotations of letterforms. But aside from an occasional critique of election-year broadsides, there is little attention paid to the role of type in politics, and the way that politics drives type. In fact, type plays a starring role in the making of nations.

In his 1991 book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, political scientist Benedict Anderson describes the modern nation as an imagined political community—a bundle of ideas about geography and identity bound by culture and force and transmitted through language and imagery. Typography is key to this cultural transmission. It’s no accident that the rise of movable type and the decline in paper prices in the 17th century coincided with the European Enlightenment. The collapse of the anciens régimes and the rise of the modern nation-state were also contemporary with the spread of independent printers publishing in local languages. No longer confined to religious and official texts, printers introduced local-language publications to readers, who began to develop a sense of simultaneity and cultural community within the larger empires bound by Latin, Chinese, and Arabic. This simultaneity is rendered literally by the graphic design of the newspaper: disparate narrative elements in an interlocking grid.

While in the 19th century national identities emerged from the bottom up, in the 20th century the modern nation was reinforced by typography from the top down when a number of states changed their writing systems. Although the spoken languages remained largely the same, their visual representations changed in every book, sign, and printed product in the country. In each of the following cases, the choice of script shaped ideas of what a modern nation is—and is not.

On January 1, 1929, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey, outlawed the use of Arabic script to write Turkish. He mandated Latin letters and Western-style numerals, both to unite the diverse Ottoman empire under a single script and language and to reduce “outside influence.” By imposing a new script, the government sought to establish an overarching Turkish state and promote a national identity that would supersede citizens’ ethnic and religious identities. The new script has been strictly enforced, including a ban on characters not in the Turkish alphabet. As recently as October 2005, a Turkish court fine