Legacy in Language: Part 5

The Future Alphabet: From Letters to Light

What comes after the alphabet?

After the six syllable types, the Great Vowel Shift, the whispers of roots and resonance—what lies beyond the ABCs?

In this final installment (for now) of the Legacy in Language series, we gaze ahead. Not with certainty, but with sensing. With the knowing that language, like essence, never stops unfolding.

If we look to the past, alphabets were born from pictures. Glyphs. Sound symbols carved in clay and stone. Letters meant “word pieces.” They were elemental, sacred.

Now we find ourselves at another threshold.

Our current alphabet is a product of Latin roots, economic shifts, printing presses, and colonization. It’s functional, yes—but what might be possible if the next evolution is not just functional but *felt*?

We are already moving there.

We shorten. We symbolize. We speak with image and emoji. We chant, code, collapse sentences into spirals of sound. We use rhythm. Frequency. Pause.

In the future, perhaps letters will no longer be lines but pulses—resonant signals carrying feeling, meaning, memory. A letter might not be a shape. It might be a color, a vibration, a hum. We may no longer “read” but *tune in.*

Perhaps our next alphabet won’t be one we recite but one we remember.

It might be circular, not linear.

Intuitive, not imposed.

Alive, not archived.

As we teach students now, we plant the seeds for what they’ll someday name. Our legacy is not only in what we leave, but what we help them become ready to create.

And maybe, when they sit to write their thoughts, they’ll reach not for 26 characters… but for something deeper.

Something luminous.

Something like themselves.

Welcome to the alphabet yet to come.

Let's begin.