Illustration by Ken Orvidas

"Giant waves coming, rush 1,000 meters away from the beach." These 10 words, if sent to mobile phones in the Bahasa, Malay, Sinhala, Tamil, and Telugu languages, might have saved thousands of people from the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. But even if South Asia had had a tsunami detection system in place -- which it didn't -- authorities would have had little chance of distributing such a message, given the variety of languages and writing systems used in the region.

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