When designing multilingual systems, what becomes the default? Whose language serves as the sample? Whose history shapes the narrative?

“Erasure by Default” describes cases where one dominant example stands in for the whole.
The MyFonts post on Cyrillic is a clear example: a script used by over 50 languages is framed solely through a russian lens. A shared typographic ecology is reduced to an imperial norm, even though Cyrillic also lives in Ukrainian, Bulgarian, or many Central Asian languages (which were forced into it under russification policies).

Power operates through defaults, metadata, and taxonomy. It’s not merely exclusion but deciding who gets to represent the many.
#Typography #Cyrillic #DecolonizeDesign #ErasureByDefault #TypeDesign #DesignPolitics