The Global Alphabet Project

In 1944 Robert Latham Owen an 89 year-old blind man and former Senator of Oklahoma stepped before the US Senate, Foreign Relations Committee to propose a simple writing system called the Global Alphabet. This system consisted of 42 unique characters that represented the sounds in English speech with additional characters for sounds in other languages. His plan was to encourage the US government to become actively involved in eliminating illiteracy around the world and help people of differing languages better understand each other and build peaceful bonds. The Global Alphabet wasn’t intended to be a new language but the basis for a system to record the sounds of all languages.

At first sight the system characters may appear like an ancient or alien script but they actually function more like musical notes for speech. Owen saw the spelling inconsistencies of English as overly difficult for language learners so he created a quick way for a student to first learn to speak a language before taking on the actual spelling. His system was intended to be easy to learn and was taught in several elementary schools where students quickly learned it in a day and were passing notes to each other within a week.

When Owen made this presentation only a few months after the end of WWII and the world was still recovering. The alphabet proposal was asking people to think about language in a new way and at time there were just too many other projects to focus on to rebuild the world. Within three years Owen would pass away and the Global Alphabet would loose it’s most enthusiastic promoter.

Although Owen’s system wasn’t perfect, The Global Alphabet Project is an effort to share his thinking with the world and encourage it’s refinement and use as an introductory training for high school language students and as a “short hand” script to record the unique sounds of word discoveries. His system would allow students a new ways to experience their own language and in the process become better listeners which is a key skill to language learning.