List: Writing systems of Africa

by likeorhate

•  Africa Alphabet

  The Africa Alphabet (also International African Alphabet or IAI alphabet) was developed in 1928 under the lead of Diedrich Westermann. He developed it with a group of Africanists at the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in London. Its aim was to enable people to write all the African languages for practical and scientific purposes without diacritics.

  

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•  Standard Alphabet by Lepsius

  The Standard Alphabet by Lepsius is an alphabet developed by Karl Richard Lepsius to write African languages. Published 1855 and in a revised edition (with many more languages added) in 1863, it was comprehensive but it was not used much as it contains a lot of diacritic marks and therefore was difficult to read, write and typeset at that time.

  

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•  Tifinagh

  Tifinagh is an alphabetic script used by some Berber peoples, notably the Tuareg, to write their language. The Berbers are the indigenous peoples of North Africa west of the Nile Valley. It is not in widespread use as a means of daily communication, but often serves to politically and symbolically assert a Berber identity.

  

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•  Egyptian hieroglyphs

  Egyptian hieroglyphs was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood. Less formal variations of the script, called hieratic and demotic, are technically not hieroglyphs.

  

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•  Coptic alphabet

  The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Demotic and is the first Alphabetic Script used for the Egyptian Language. There are in fact several Coptic alphabets as the Coptic writing system may vary greatly among the various dialects and subdialects of the Coptic language.

  

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•  Hieratic

  Hieratic is a cursive writing system used in pharaonic Egypt that developed alongside the hieroglyphic system, to which it is intimately related. It was primarily written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus, allowing scribes to write quickly without resorting to the time-consuming hieroglyphs.

  

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•  African reference alphabet

  An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended to use single letters for a sound instead of using two or three-letter combinations or letters with diacritical marks. The African Reference Alphabet is clearly related to the Africa Alphabet and reflected practice based on the latter.

  

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•  N'Ko

  N'Ko (ߒߞߏ) is both a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949 as a writing system for the Mande languages of West Africa, and the name of the literary language itself written in the script. The term N'Ko means 'I say' in all Manding languages. The script has a few similarities to the Arabic alphabet, notably its direction (right-to-left) and the connected letters. It obligatorily marks both tone and vowels.

  

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•  Old Nubian language

  Old Nubian is an ancient variety of Nubian, spoken until about the 15th century AD. It is ancestral to modern-day Nobiin and related to other Nubian languages such as Dongolawi. It was used throughout the medieval Christian kingdom of Makuria and its satellite Nobadia. The language is preserved in at least a hundred pages of documents, mostly of a religious nature, written using a modified form of the Coptic script; the best known is The Martyrdom of Saint Menas.

  

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•  Meroitic script

  The Meroitic script is an alphabetic script originally derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, used to write the Meroitic language of the Kingdom of Meroë/Kush. It was developed sometime during the Napatan Period (about 700–300 BCE), and first appears in the 2nd century BCE. For a time, it was also possibly used to write the Nubian language of the successor Nubian kingdoms.

  

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•  Mende language

  Mende (Mɛnde yia) is a major language of Sierra Leone, with some speakers in neighboring Liberia. It is spoken both by the Mende people and by other ethnic groups as a regional lingua franca in southern Sierra Leone. Mende is a tonal language belonging to the Mande branch of the Niger-Congo language family. In 1921, Kisimi Kamara invented a syllabary for Mende he called Kikakui .

  

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•  Osmanya script

  The Osmanya script, also known as far soomaali or "Somali writing", is a writing script created to transcribe the Somali language. It was invented between 1920 and 1922 by Osman Yusuf Kenadid of the Majeerteen Darod clan, the nephew of Sultan Yusuf Ali Kenadid of the Sultanate of Hobyo.

  

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•  Dinka alphabet

  The Dinka alphabet as used by the Sudanese Dinka people writing the Dinka language is a Latin-based alphabet, adding some letters adapted from the International Phonetic Alphabet: As you can see, Dinka does not use f, j, q, s, v, x, and z; and h is used in digraphs only. Note that ɛ̈ (open e with trema) and ɔ̈ (open o with trema) do not exist as precomposed characters in Unicode and must therefore be generated using U+0308, the diaeresis combining diacritic.

  

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•  Demotic (Egyptian)

  Demotic refers to either the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Delta, or the stage of the Egyptian language following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts. By convention, the word "Demotic" is capitalized in order to distinguish it from demotic Greek.

  

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•  Ge'ez alphabet

  

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•  Pan-Nigerian Alphabet

  The Pan-Nigerian Alphabet is a set of 33 Latin letters standardized by the National Language Centre of Nigeria in the 1980s. It is intended to be sufficient to write all the languages of Nigeria without using digraphs.

  

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•  Mandombe

  Mandombe or Mandombé, is a native African alphasyllabary invented in 1978 by Wabeladio Payi in Mbanza Ngungu in the Bas-Congo province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This script is taught in primary, secondary and post-secondary schools run by the Kimbanguist Church in Angola, the Republic of the Congo, DR Congo, and by more than 500 professors at the Centre for the Negro-African Script in DR Congo.

  

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•  Sorabe alphabet

  Sorabe, or Sora-be, is an alphabet based on Arabic used to transcribe the Malagasy language (belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian language family) and the Antemoro Malagasy dialect in particular dating from the 17th century. Researchers are still hypothesizing about the origins of this transcription system. "Sorabe" means literally "large writings" from Arabic "sura" (writing) and Malagasy "be" (large).

  

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•  Vai syllabary

  The Vai syllabary is a syllabic writing system devised for the Vai language by Momolu Duwalu Bukele of Jondu, in what is now Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia. He is regarded within the Vai community, as well as by most scholars, as the syllabary's inventor and chief promoter when it was first documented in the 1830s.

  

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•  Nsibidi

  Nsibidi is a traditional ideographic set of symbols indigenous to West Africa. The name has also been used to refer to the clerical secret society, the Ekpe secret society of Calabar Kingdom believed to have invented the script. The Nsibidi symbols were invented and used by the Ekpe secret society of the Ekoi/Efik/Ibibio/Annang/Igbo of coastal Southeastern Nigeria. It was and is still a means of identification and of transmitting the society's information.

  

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•  Berber Latin alphabet

  The Berber Latin alphabet is the version of the Latin alphabet used to write Northern Berber languages (or varieties). It uses the 23 standard letters, 7 modified letters and borrows 2 letters from the Greek alphabet. The Greek borrowed letters are mainly used by Algerian Berber writers only. In the interests of pan-dialectal legibility, it omits the partly phonemic contrast found in some Berber language varieties between stops and fricatives.

  

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•  Kpelle syllabary

  The Kpelle syllabary was invented circa 1935 by Chief Gbili of Sanoyie, Liberia. It was intended for writing the Kpelle language, a member of the Mande group of Niger-Congo languages spoken by about 490,000 people in Liberia and around 300,000 people in Guinea. The syllabary consists of 88 graphemes and is written from left to right in horizontal rows. Many of the glyphs have more than one form.

  

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•  Ajami script

  The term Ajami, or Ajamiyya, which comes from the Arabic root for "foreign" or "stranger," has been applied to Arabic-based orthographies used for writing African languages.

  

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•  ISO 6438

  ISO 6438:1983, Documentation — African coded character set for bibliographic information interchange, is an ISO standard for an 8-bit character encoding for African languages. It has had little use (such as being available through UNIMARC). In practice it is now superseded by Unicode.

  

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•  Writing systems of Africa

  The Writing Systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of written language on the African continent. The importance of oral culture and tradition in Africa and the recent dominance of European languages through colonialism, among other factors, have often led to the misconception that African languages as a whole either have no written forms, or have been put to writing only very recently.

  

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