The Vai script of Liberia was created from scratch in about 1834 by 8 completely illiterate men who wrote in ink made from crushed berries. Because of its isolation, and the way it has continued to develop up until the present day, we thought it might tell us something important about how writing evolves over short spaces of time. The 8 Vai creators set out to design symbols for each of their language’s syllables, inspired by a dream. Their chosen symbols represented physical things like a pregnant woman, water, and bullets, as well as more abstract traditional emblems. Over the first 171 years of its history, the Vai script did become increasingly compressed. The simplification occurred over generations of users; symbols with the highest complexity were simplified the most. These changes are far from random. Languages pass a kind of natural selection process via memory and learning, where the hardest to recall features do not survive. As the letters became less complex, they also became more uniform. This is despite the language never having been adopted for mass production or for bureaucratic needs. These uses are what seemed to help standardize other languages – for example, Mesopotamia’s writing standardization coincided with the implementation of state-wide systems.

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