Rongorongo remains formally undeciphered. Scholars are divided over whether its roughly six hundred glyph shapes record language directly, in a logo-syllabic system, or serve as a mnemonic aid for memorized chants and genealogies rather than full writing. Steven Roger Fischer claimed a partial decipherment of one tablet in the 1990s, but Jacques Guy and Igor Pozdniakov later showed the pattern he relied on is a generic feature of the script and of Polynesian chant structure generally, not evidence specific to his reading, and the field has not accepted his claim.
What would resolve this A reproducible decipherment method validated independently by multiple specialists, or the discovery of a bilingual text pairing rongorongo with a known language, neither of which exists today.
OpenPolynesian linguistics and epigraphySpoken Past: Rongorongo, Easter Island's Undeciphered Script