This article investigates the invention of new writing systems, or “neographies”, and their uncertain trajectories in a digital age. It offers a working definition of neographies and surveys key themes in the literature: the motivations for script invention, factors influencing adoption, and the role of digital tools in enabling or impeding success. In particular, it attends to the difficulties of standardizing a script in a technical code when the script is still evolving and expanding, and the ways in which technologists have become involved in decisions about a script’s future. It uses the case study of the Adlam script, tracing its path from grassroots dissemination to Unicode encoding and subsequent refinements. The article concludes by outlining new directions for the study of neographies.

While linguistic access in the digital sphere is a growing concern, many overlook the key role of written scripts in mediating who can fully utilize digital tools. This interview presents the experiences and perspectives of Kamal Mansour, a pre-eminent typographer working to support the world’s scripts with enabled fonts, in conversation with Dr Isabelle Alice Zaugg, a scholar of communication and semiotics who investigates the technical foundations for digital language justice. An enabled font is a key piece of digital infrastructure required to exchange text in a script and the language(s) it represents, thus widening linguistic inclusion in the digital sphere. However, moving written scripts from the page on to the screen also requires multiple levels of technical policy, which represent layered challenges considering that digital architecture is designed around Latin script defaults and a capitalist consumption model that does not take into account the economics of the Majority World. This interview also explores the essential place of typography within the visual culture of language communities as well as the skills and intuition required of typographers as they design culturally appropriate fonts for scripts from unfamiliar contexts. This interview highlights the inspiration and the reflections of one of the most experienced typographers in the world, taking us in-depth into what it would really take for digital tools to enrich the communication ecosystems of all language communities.

“The Digital Lives of Greater South Languages” is a special issue of Modern Languages Open which includes scholarly research, practitioner reflections, and speculative proposals regarding the digital vitality of languages from the Greater South. In this introduction to the special issue, the term “Greater South” is elucidated, which encompasses language communities that have been historically excluded from digital-linguistic support, many of which have nonetheless found pathways to flourish online, while centering their perspectives within the movement toward a digital sphere animated by their aspirations. The collection addresses language revitalization and reclamation facilitated by digital technologies, new connections forged among digital publics through language, the links between intellectual and digital sovereignty, language justice in the context of algorithmic tools such as machine translation and autocomplete, how digital infrastructure and typographic design ensure digital access for language communities, the invention of new scripts in the digital age, and the importance of strengthening our capacity to dream of a better future for our multilingual digital neighborhood.

How do we, as practitioners of comparative literature, decide what to compare? What makes for a viable, or indeed a responsible, corpus for comparison in terms of scale and method? And which theoretical frameworks are best able to undergird localised or small-scale comparative networks? This article offers one response to these questions by opening up Claudia Durastanti’s novel La straniera to comparative networking through modes of reading in translation. It creates a critical constellation around the central text to include the author, the English translation, its translator and two other texts translated by Durastanti: Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times. The idea of creating a network to unfold comparisons around a single textual artefact is informed by Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, and by Rita Felski’s work centralising translation within such comparative networking. The goal is to see what this focus on translation (as both theme and practice) can add to our understanding of comparative links between the two versions of the same text, and of its networked relations with other texts translated by the same author and translator. The article ultimately suggests that ANT’s foregrounding of translation as a transformational force can shore up critical appreciation for cross-textual practices of linguistic-cultural deformation, interference and disruption.

The age of Catherine the Great was also the great age of Russian court poetry. Praise for the monarch, written by scientists, physicians, men (and women) of letters, trumpeted a standard set of virtues attributed to the Minerva of the North. If the ideological content of poems and especially the ode was not formally prescribed, the conventions of panegyric and rhetorical flourishes nonetheless imposed formulaic content. Writers bent on delivering a specific message understood that giving advice was not a straightforward matter, resorting to the arts of praise to create the illusion that everything suggested was already acceptable to the enlightened monarch. Ippolit Bogdanovich was one of the most versatile poets of the period, appreciated for his original compositions and recognised for his adaptations of French poetry. He was also one of the most adept at the graceful packaging of didactic themes or conveying a policy suggestion. This essay considers how his translation of Voltaire’s Épître à l’impératrice de Russie (1771) reworks a famous poem of praise. Adaptation of a foreign work proves to be an opportunity to exploit well-received tropes in the service of a subtle change of message. Within its conventional duty to praise, Bogdanovich’s rewriting of Voltaire shifts the emphasis away from the theme of Orientalism and Catherine’s Turkish Wars to the benefits of reason and civilisation. The effect is to present a different perspective on the value of the empress’s achievements, offering praise but also implicitly a challenge to her to be better than Voltaire’s more militaristic portrait would have her be.

Critics have signalled the difficulties for artists from African countries and their diasporas in relation to the hegemonic international art system. Those whose work appears to conform to stereotypes, by depicting subjects such as the Islamic veil, Islamist terrorism and war, more easily gain international visibility (see, for example, Ben Soltane). Tunis-based art historian and curator Rachida Triki signalled, in 2009, an emerging tendency in the work of the latest generation of Tunisian and Maghrebi artists to resist "à la fois à l'uniformisation du goût opérée par le marché mondialisé de l'art, et au traditionalisme à visée identitaire" (Triki, "Art" 54). These artists resist such external and internal essentialising views by drawing on influences from within and beyond Tunisia: "[c]réer dans l'entre-deux de l'endogène et de l'exogène" (Triki, "Art" 58). Triki calls this concept "transcultural resistance". In this article, I explore how art can resist both globalised and nationalist frameworks by revealing -and reinterpreting -what Walter Mignolo has referred to as "ways of knowing and sensing" that have been hidden by "zero point epistemology" (80) -that is, the enduring colonial belief that there is a transparent and universal knowledge. I show how such art also innovates new ways of knowing, sensing or being. This article asks how art (particularly photography, video and installation) can contribute to decolonial understandings of culture. It focuses primarily on a series of photographic and video portraits by British Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj, My Rock Stars, which incorporates as participants a range of artists from musicians to masters of Capoeira and visual artists. It concentrates on the series as presented at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 2020, while making comparisons to shows of alternative selections of the portraits in Paris and Casablanca.

In this article, the editors introduce the Digital Modern Languages Special Collection that results from an open call that sought out new and emerging research at the intersection of Modern Languages and digital culture, media and technologies. They explain the intentionally wide-ranging and transdisciplinary scope of the Collection, which reflects an openness to the many ways Digital Modern Languages research is practised. The Collection also includes research on a wide range of geographical and linguistic contexts, reflecting wider calls to move beyond the limited range of languages traditionally associated with "Modern Languages". Through this combined transdisciplinary and cross-languages focus, the Collection seeks to contribute to the broader strategic identity transformation of the wider field.

This article explores the development of speculative Black digital territories in Brazil and examines the challenge they pose to online architectures of social control. It does so through an analysis of Baobáxia, an autonomous digital infrastructure project that connects the audio-visual archives of quilombo communities. I place Baobáxia, which is run by Rede Mocambos, within a spectrum of strategies of Black digital territorializations in Brazil before carrying out a closer analysis of the hesitation it evidences between seeking permanence for the archives of its communities and turning network precarity into a strategy of resistance against digital capitalism. The article ends by considering the Baobáxia network as an enactment of speculative technology by placing it in the context of recent works of Afrofuturist science fiction, including the 2019 film Bacurau, that have reimagined the quilombo for the digital age. While Big Tech platforms use online data to predict and therefore control the behaviour of internet users (which Sunha Hong describes as "technologies of speculation"), Baobáxia takes a step towards placing control of the future in the hands of communities and therefore reinstating the possibility of a future that might be different to the present. 2 King Modern Languages Open

This dialogue approaches the experiences and reflections of early career researchers (ECRs), that is, those academics who have completed their PhDs either recently or within the last 5–7 years. The dialogue brings to the forefront recollections of how the COVID pandemic changed research and teaching practices in higher education, emphasising, in particular, the challenges affecting ECRs, who often are on precarious contracts, are still developing their own pedagogical approaches, and have not yet built a network of support. These circumstances make the experiences of ECRs different from those of more experienced academics and university teachers. The dialogues aim to bring to the discussion how these experiences have shaped the way that ECRs engage with research and teaching. The dialogue brings interesting reflections on the way that the aftermath of the pandemic has brought more inclusive practices for participation, promoted collaborations, and inspired novel teaching approaches. However, it also notes how ECRs have been left in many cases to their own initiatives and without adequate mentorship or support, often overloaded by added challenges and feelings of isolation. Finally, the dialogue suggests improvements to current higher education practices and policies, which can significantly and positively impact the development of ECRs.

Guidebooks play an important role in increasing the visibility of a nation, as they introduce the country to potential visitors and create images prior to travelling. However, they also tend to reinforce stereotypes and create "romantic fictions" (Mahn 2008) . This article examines the representation of Wales in French and German guidebooks and consequently elucidates the cultural and political recognition of Wales in these continental texts. The depiction of Wales as a distinct entity on an administrative, or rather on a cultural and linguistic level will be discussed, as well as the commonalities and differences between French and German views.