One in a series — cross-posted from our sister publication, HILOBROW — dedicated to 25 of our favorite typefaces.

FAUX DEVANAGARI | CREATOR UNKNOWN | c. 2000s

I live in an urban center that’s dotted with yoga studios, and I occasionally see a bumper sticker on a car that reads ‘NAMASTE’ in a faux-Devanagari font. If you’re unfamiliar with the word, it’s from a greeting that has been used across South Asia for thousands of years — saying ‘namaste’, while usually also placing the palms together in front of the chest and bowing slightly. Both a salutation and a valediction, it is typically performed at the start and end of yoga practices.

The faux-Devanagari font is one of a large variety of ‘ethnic typefaces’, of which the best known, at least in the US, is the so-called ‘chop suey font’, which has been used since the 1930s in signage for Chinese and other Asian restaurants. Paul Shaw makes the point that stereotypic typefaces like these survive for a commercial purpose: “Restaurant owners want passersby (often in cars rather than on foot) to know immediately that they serve Chinese (or Greek, or Jewish) food, and a lettering style that achieves this is welcome.” Like all stereotypes, it matters who is using it, and to what end. The US is country of immigrants, which means that we are awash in repurposed culture, little of which is seen as appropriation. And yet seeing this sticker always leaves me vaguely irked. I think it’s because of the gulf between what I’m expected to think it means (‘I do yoga! And I’m socially conscious!’) and what, as the child of South Asian immigrants, I actually think it means (‘I am saying ‘hello’ by using a word whose larger social context I am almost entirely unaware of.’)

I’ve joked to my friends that I want to get an analogous bumper sticker to my car that just says ‘Hello’ in Fraktur. Or I could up the ante and get a bumper sticker that says ‘Hello’ in Japanese katakana, printed in this font.