Adelphe is a text typeface whose main goal is to propose several ways to practice inclusive writing for long text, in small size, and without altering its texture. Its name, which a French neologism meaning “sibling” (French used to only have the gender-specific equivalents of “sister” and “brother”), is widely used within queer activist communities. But it’s also a word that finds its etymology in ancient Greek, just like scholarly terms. And there is a will with this typeface to go on this ground, on the ground of the culture which defines itself as “high” and knowledgeable. And, thus, not to let the history of language and writing be confiscated by the conservative side. This is why Adelphe, in its design, presents classical proportions, inherited from the Renaissance, and a structure close to calligraphy, with a fluidity in the ductus which produces harmonious shapes also found in the design of inclusive glyphs. There are 3 versions of Adelphe which offer 3 different ways of practicing inclusive writing. Adelphe Germinal in which the middle dot is used, Adelphe Floréal in which the first letters of the masculine and feminine endings are marked by subscript diacritics (accents under letters), and Adelphe Fructidor which combines the use of an alternative form of “e” and ligatures. 

The inclusive fonts distributed by the Bye Bye Binary collective on its library offer many new glyphs (mutant letters, ligatures, symbiosis elements) in addition to the middle dot and other solutions regularly used to write and compose texts in inclusive writing. Our keyboards do not (yet) contain the keys for these characters. So to make this rainbow of signs usable by all, Bye Bye Binary is building common practices, soft and raging standards, which together form the Queer Unicode Initiative (QUNI). QUNI allows us to gather our fonts, in all their diversity, around the same encoding system in order to make them useable by a large public.

Adelphe’s specimen webpage : eugéniebidaut.eu/adelphe

Bye Bye Binary’ typotheque : typotheque.genderfluid.space/index.html