West Africa has been busy lately. Busy inventing writing. Since the 1800s, this area has become
home to dozens of brand new scripts. One paper I'm reading counts at least twenty-six. Can
most of us even name that many scripts from outside Africa!? What is happening here? Why
so many? Today let's get curious about West Africa and this new chapter they're adding
to the history of writing.
The south of Guinea. Two young brothers have locked themselves in their room to complete
an unusual task: closing their eyes and drawing lines. At the ages of ten and fourteen, together
they're deciding on shapes of signs, envisioning how a people's writing system will work at
the very start of an entire script's history.
This history isn't ancient. It's not that old at all. The brothers are Abdoulaye and
Ibrahima, and the year is 1986. Back then, if you were from among their Fula people and
wanted to pass a message to a relative, you'd get a letter transcribed in Ajami, basically
Arabic adapted to kind of fit your language. You'd bring it to a taxi or anyone heading
towards the destination, and hopefully find someone skilled in guessing your native words
that the Ajami script represented. Someone like Ibrahim's and Abdoulaye's dad, who is very
good at this Ajami letter guessing game. The brothers follow in his footsteps, get good
at it, too. But they want more. They want a script meant for their language
and their people.
They invent a script that has come to be known as Adlam. It's spreading quickly throughout
their community of traditionally nomadic people living across many countries, including among
women who didn't attend school in English or French. Today, Fula people teach classes
in Adlam, write letters and books in Adlam and post and text in Adlam on their phones.
The brothers would hardly be the first or the last to create a brand new script for
one of West Africa's tongues.
Decades before Adlam, in the 1940s, prolific author and language scholar Sulemana Kantɛ
is vexed by how a Lebanese journalist dismisses his native language: unlike colonial literate
cultures, Africa's Indigenous voices are as impossible to capture in writing as
birds chirping. Instead of taking this as a decisive putdown, these words strike Kantɛ as a challenge.
He unveils a new standard for Manding languages, embracing many dialects at once by naming the script
with a word they all share: N'ko, "I say". N'ko goes on to become one of Africa's most
successful scripts.
Adlam and N'ko both have characteristics that may remind you of Arabic: written right to
left, often or always in a cursive connected style. They also have things reminiscent of
Latin script: full vowel letters. And numbers that run in the same direction as the text.
(Arabic!!) But the symbols, and the features, are their own.
Of course, we could walk down this list of well over twenty other West African scripts,
with a story behind each one: Ndebe, Garay, Bété, Yoruba Holy Writing, Shü-mom, and
back two centuries to the 1800s and the Vai syllabary.
In a broader African context, this list of scripts is not alone either. Over the same
time period, far to the east Beria have adopted and popularized camel brand writing. Old southern
African symbology gets crafted into a new Bantu writing system. And there are multiple home-grown
Somali scripts. But the sheer number makes West Africa a writing systems hotbed.
Why invent so many scripts though? Where does this come from?
At face value, these scripts solve a technical linguistic problem: Ajami doesn't represent
Maninka or Fula well, or Latin doesn't represent Igbo or Vai.
Consider this need, this challenge in its place, in the context of where we are. West Africa
is an area full of unique features you'd have to account for when creating a writing system,
including features that are rare elsewhere.
Here are two different Fula words. Yes, different! In the first word, the nasal n and the d fall
in two separate syllables: hin-du. Ok. But the second requires a bit of explanation.
So, West Africa has prenasalized consonants. You start a stop sound in your nose — m,
n, ŋ — and then immediately raise your soft palate to release it through your mouth
– b, d, g – all in a single unit: mbe, ngo, and... ndu. That's why the second word is
a different word, also two syllables. It's hin-du vs hi-ndu. Well,
Adlam has a symbol for that!
Two more words for you. What's the difference here? Like many languages you've met before if you've
been listening to my stories over the years, Fula varieties distinguish short and long
vowels. So there's a continuum of Fula languages. One of them is known as Pular with a short
a, and another one is called Pulaar with long a. Adlam has a symbol to represent that, too!
What just may be the rarest of West Africa's sounds are these kind of two sounds in one.
Brace your articulators! Put your tongue in position to say a g and your lips in position
to say a b. Try to release both of them at the same time: ɡ͡b. And without voicing:
k͡p. Or nasal: ŋ͡m. So instead of calling this language Ig-bo, try saying I-ɡ͡bo.
(And here's an extra credit challenge from Vai: what happens if you prenasalize this sound?)
Wow, you're getting a phonetic workout today. These sounds are so common in the area's names and
words that Adlam has symbols dedicated to them.
A triangle pointing downwards is the N'ko letter for this double sound. But N'ko also
supports some West African features missing from Adlam. So N'ko has seven vowel letters
for the seven vowels of Manding languages. And, as usual in this part of Africa, Manding
vowels are tonal. In fact, south of the Sahara, most languages care about tone. Wolof and
Fula are exceptional for not doing this. And that's why Kantɛ gave N'ko seven tone marks,
combining short and long pronunciation of vowels with tones that are falling or rising
or low or high. (...Hmm.)
One last West African feature: nasal vowels. This area is very into nasalization, with
languages that distinguish regular versus nasal vowels in short and long flavors, or
even spreading nasalization across nearby vowels in a way that'd make you think you
were hearing Guaraní. And N'ko handles this. It equips nasal vowels with a simple dot below.
So all combined, N'ko has a compact way to represent nasalization, length and tone for the vowels
of Manding languages.
And the Vai script has symbols for all of these except tone. Just as rows of Vai signs
represent what you might consider "normal" consonant-vowel syllables, so too are there
rows of signs for prenasalized and for doubly articulated sounds. Not specially marked.
Not treated as unique cases. Each is just another sign fit for a language where they
are natively effortless, everyday sounds.
That's not the whole story though. Each of these scripts isn't just a linguistic exercise.
That's actually not the main reason why they exist. There's more context here. The context
of a less-told history where West Africa has long used visual graphic codes. Ancient Nsibidi
symbols, still the inspiration behind multiple of these modern scripts. The Adinkra signs in Ghana
and Côte d'Ivoire. Or the countless famed multilingual medieval manuscripts of Timbuktu.
All of this before colonization. Rupture.
These many scripts are about people finding an Indigenous West African vision of the written
word. Often a literal vision. We're told the inspiration for the Vai script and for Mandombe
came in a dream. For N'ko, it was almost a dare to show off that West African languages
are literary and writable. And ADLaM, its very name has become an acrophonic definition
for the script's grassroots community: the letters that protect the people from vanishing.
At the start, I recounted how two young brothers stood at the root of an entire script's history.
Well, most of that history looks yet to be written.
Thank you for watching. And to my patrons for supporting me and being so encouraging
while I learned and animated. Ah, this the part where I say: stick around and subscribe
for language.