Book Dash is a publisher with social impact at our heart. We use an innovative volunteer-driven and fast-paced model for creating affordable new African storybooks. We publish and share these books freely with the world at bookdash.org.
Book Dash exists because there is a huge inequality in
- access to books for young children,
- whose stories are featured in those books
- and, crucially for literacy development, in which languages those books are available.
Despite research showing the importance of children growing up in a print-rich, mothertongue environment, there is a huge lack of beautiful, appropriate and high-quality books in indigenous languages. This is especially true for minority languages with fewer numbers of native speakers, such as TshiVenda in South Africa with 1.3 million native speakers out of the then-52 million inhabitants (2011 census statistics).
This lack of reading materials is further compacted because the written orthography of TshiVenda has five diacritics or “glyphs” that are unique to the TshiVenda alphabet (these are markings like an accent on a letter that indicate a difference in pronunciation from the same letter when unmarked). As a result, these unique glyphs are not commonly catered for when font designers create new fonts. Until now, very few fonts had glyph sets that included all the characters that TshiVenda needs.
Quicksand (fonts.google.com/specimen/Quicksand) is a favourite font at Book Dash. Its open-licensed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL) which means anyone can use it freely (with credit). Its sans serif, geometric-shaped characters with expanded character spacing are perfect for early exposure to written language, for children as well as caregivers who may have varying levels of reading confidence. The rounded edges make it extra-friendly for young children, and the scalability means it looks crisp at all sizes.
However, Quicksand was one of those fonts that didn’t include the five unique TshiVenda glyphs. Practically, this meant that every time a Book Dash book was set in Quicksand, the TshiVenda translation had to be typeset in a different font. On our website, too, we use Quicksand and the TshiVenda titles rendered incorrectly.
Book Dash was determined to change this: Through the magic of the internet, we got in touch with one of the designers of Quicksand, Thomas Jockin (passionate type designer and founder of TypeThursday). We explained our vision, detailed the specific need and, as a type designer passionate about inclusion and equal access we found an ally.
Today, we’re absolutely thrilled to share that the official Quicksand font now includes the following glyphs unique to the TshiVenda alphabet: Ḓ Ḽ Ṋ Ṅ Ṱ ḓ ḽ ṋ ṅ ṱ .
This means that Quicksand is now more accessible for all! Anyone who creates or sets books in TshiVenda can now use these new glyphs. They’re fully integrated on the Google Fonts page for Quicksand, where you can download the beautiful font for free: fonts.google.com/specimen/Quicksand
Below, see examples of the new Quicksand glyphs used in existing Book Dash books in TshiVenda. We’ll now start the process of setting our existing TshiVenda versions in Quicksand, and we’ll be able to use it for all TshiVenda books going forward, too.
Click here to read all the TshiVenda language Book Dash books for free.
