Google and Monotype have launched Noto, an open-source typeface family that encompasses every written language in the world, living and dead. It is one of the largest typographic projects ever undertaken and the result of five years collaborative work.

Noto is a unified set of typesets and writing systems with a harmonious look and feel, that includes over 800 languages and 100 written scripts from Latin, Cyrillic and Hebrew to Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Cherokee and Emoji.

One of the aims of the Noto project is to digitally preserve little-spoken or dead languages to help enable global communication “across borders, languages, cultures and time periods”. It also includes letters in multiple serif and sans serif styles in up to eight weights, as well as numbers, symbols and musical notations.

By creating a digital representation of all the scripts in the Unicode standard, “in many cases we’ve produced the first font ever to serve a particular language community,” says Kamal Mansour, linguistic typographer at Monotype. “So to me, the aim is to serve that human community that would otherwise be deprived of the ability to have a digital heritage.”