Writing systems of Africa

The writing systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of writing systems on the African continent, both indigenous and those introduced.

Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Today, the Latin script is commonly encountered across Africa, especially Sub-Saharan Africa. Arabic script is mainly used in North Africa and Ge'ez/Ethiopic script is dominant in the Horn of Africa. Regionally and in some localities, other scripts may be of significant importance.

Indigenous writing systems

Ancient African orthographies
Bilingual "Stop" sign in Tifinagh. (qif in Arabic, bedd in Riffian)

Ancient Egyptian

Perhaps the most famous African writing system is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. These developed later into forms known as Hieratic, Demotic and, through Phoenician and Greek, Coptic. The Coptic language is still used today as the liturgical language in the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the Coptic Catholic Church of Alexandria. As mentioned above, the Bohairic dialect of Coptic is used currently in the Coptic Orthodox Church. Other dialects include Sahidic, Akhmimic, Lycopolitan, Fayyumic, and Oxyrhynchite.

Ancient Meroitic
Main article: Meroitic alphabet

The Meroitic language and its writing system was used in Meroë and the wider Kingdom of Kush (in modern day Sudan) during the Meroitic period. It was used from 300 BCE to 400 CE.

Tifinagh

The Tifinagh alphabet is still actively used to varying degrees in trade and modernized forms for writing of Berber languages (Tamazight, Tamashek, etc.) of the Maghreb, Sahara, and Sahel regions (Savage 2008).

Neo-Tifinagh is encoded in the Unicode range U+2D30 to U+2D7F, starting from version 4.1.0. There are 55 defined characters, but there are more characters being used than those defined. In ISO 15924, the code Tfng is assigned to Neo-Tifinagh.

Ge'ez
Genesis 29.11–16 in Geʽez

The Geʽez script is an abugida that was developed in Horn of Africa in the 8th-9th century BC for writing the Geʽez language. The script is used today in Ethiopia and Eritrea for Amharic, Tigrinya, and several other languages. It is sometimes called Ethiopic, and is known in Ethiopia as the fidel or abugida (the actual origin of the 21st century linguistic term "abugida" applied to Brahmic scripts of India).

Geʽez or Ethiopic has been computerized and assigned Unicode 3.0 codepoints between U+1200 and U+137F (decimal 4608–4991), containing the basic syllable signs for Geʽez, Amharic, and Tigrinya, punctuation and numerals.

Nsibidi

Nsibidi (also known as "nsibiri",[1] "nchibiddi", and "nchibiddy"[2]) is a system of symbols indigenous to what is now southeastern Nigeria that is apparently an ideographic script, though there have been suggestions that it includes logographic elements.[3] The symbols are at least several centuries old: early forms appeared on excavated pottery as well as what are most likely ceramic stools and headrests from the Calabar region, with a range of dates from 400 to 1400 CE.[4][5]

Adinkra

Adinkra is a set of symbols developed by the Akan, used to represent concepts and aphorisms. Oral tradition attributes the origin of adinkra to Gyaman in modern-day Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.[6][7] According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, they were one of the means for "supporting the transmission of a complex and nuanced body of practice and belief".[8]

Lusona

Lusona is an ideogram that functioned as mnemonic devices to record proverbs, fables, games, riddles and animals, and to transmit knowledge.[9] They originate in what is now eastern Angola, northwestern Zambia and adjacent areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.[10]

East Africa

The Luo script was developed to write Dholuo in Kenya in 2009.

The Osmanya alphabet.

Somalia: Writing systems developed in the twentieth century for transcribing Somali include the Osmanya, Borama and Kaddare alphabets, which were invented by Osman Yusuf Kenadid, Sheikh Abdurahman Sheikh Nuur and Hussein Sheikh Ahmed Kaddare, respectively.[11] The Osmanya script is today available in the Unicode range 10480-104AF [from U+10480 - U+104AF (66688–66735)].

Ethiopia: An alphasyllabic script for Oromo was invented in the late 1950s by Sheikh Bakri Sapalo (1895-1980), and saw limited use.[12]

Southern Africa

West and Central Africa

There are various other writing systems native to West Africa [16] and Central Africa.[17] In the last two centuries, a large variety of writing systems have been created in Africa (Dalby 1967, 1968, 1969). Some are still in use today, while others have been largely displaced by non-African writing such as the Arabic script and the Latin script. Below are non-Latin and non-Arabic-based writing systems used to write various languages of Africa.

The Bamum (Bamun; also Shumom) system of pictographic writing was invented beginning in the late 19th century by Sultan Njoya Ibrahim for writing the Bamun language in what is now Cameroon. It quickly developed into a syllabary. It is rarely used today, but a fair amount of material written in this script still exists.[18]

Other modern writing systems developed in West Africa include:

Introduced and adapted writing systems
The Phoenician alphabet.

Most written scripts, including Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, were based on previous written scripts and the origin of the history of the alphabet is ultimately Egyptian Hieroglyphs, through Proto-Sinaitic or Old Canaanite. Many other indigenous African scripts were similarly developed from previous scripts.

Phoenician/Punic

The Phoenicians from what is now Lebanon traded with North Africans and founded cities there, the most famous being Carthage. The Phoenician alphabet is thought to be the origin of many others, including: Arabic, Greek, and Latin. The Carthaginian dialect is called Punic.[28] Today's Tifinagh is thought by some scholars to be descended from Punic, but this is still under debate.

Additionally, the Proto-Sinaitic Wadi el-Hol inscriptions indicate the presence of an extremely early form of the script in central Egypt (near the modern city of Qena) in the early 2nd millennium BC.

Greek

The Greek alphabet was adapted in Egypt to the Coptic alphabet (with the addition of 7 letters derived from ancient Demotic) in order to write the language (which is today only a liturgical language of the Coptic Church). An uncial variant of the Coptic alphabet was used from the 8th to the 15th century for writing Old Nubian, an ancient variety of the Nubian language.

Arabic
Ancient Somali-Arabic stone tablet: a system also known as Wadaad writing.

The Arabic script was introduced into Africa by the spread of Islam and by trade. Apart from its obvious use for the Arabic language, it has been adapted for a number of other languages over the centuries. The Arabic script is still used in some of these cases, but not in others.

It was often necessary to modify the script to accommodate sounds not represented in the script as used for the Arabic language. The adapted form of the script is also called Ajami, especially in the Sahel, and sometimes by specific names for individual languages, such as Wolofal, Sorabe, and Wadaad writing. Despite the existence of a widely known and well-established script in Ethiopia, there are a few cases where Muslims in Ethiopia have used the Arabic script, instead, for reasons of religious identity.

There are no official standard forms or orthographies, though local usage follows traditional practice for the area or language. There was an effort by ISESCO to standardize Ajami usage. Some critics believe this relied too much on Perso-Arabic script forms and not enough on existing use in Africa. In any event, the effect of that standardization effort has been limited.

Latin
See also: Latin-script alphabet and Case variants of IPA letters
Table of Unicode Berber Latin alphabet letters used in Kabyle.

The first systematic attempts to adapt the Latin script to African languages were probably those of Christian missionaries on the eve of European colonization (Pasch 2008). These however were isolated, done by people without linguistic training, and sometimes resulted in competing systems for the same or similar languages.

One of the challenges in adapting the Latin script to many African languages was the use in those tongues of sounds unfamiliar to Europeans and thus without writing convention they could resort to. Various use was made of letter combinations, modifications, and diacritics to represent such sounds. Some resulting orthographies, such as the Yoruba writing system established by the late 19th century, have remained largely intact.

In many cases, the colonial regimes had little interest in the writing of African languages, but in others they did. In the case of Hausa in Northern Nigeria, for instance, the colonial government was directly involved in determining the written forms for the language.

Since the colonial period, there have been efforts to propose and promulgate standardized or at least harmonized approaches to using the Latin script for African languages. Examples include the Standard Alphabet by Lepsius (mid-19th century) and the Africa Alphabet of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (1928, 1930).

Following independence there has been continued attention to the transcription of African languages. In the 1960s and 1970s, UNESCO facilitated several "expert meetings" on the subject, including a seminal meeting in Bamako in 1966, and one in Niamey in 1978. The latter produced the African reference alphabet. Various country-level standardizations have also been made or proposed, such as the Pan-Nigerian alphabet. A Berber Latin alphabet for northern Berber includes extended Latin characters and two Greek letters.

Such discussions continue, especially on more local scales regarding cross-border languages.

Hebrew

There has been a Jewish presence in North Africa for millennia, with communities speaking a variety of different languages. Though some of these are written with the Arabic script (as is the case with Judeo-Tunisian Arabic) or with Ge'ez (as with Kayla and Qwara), many- including Haketia and several forms of Judeo-Arabic- have made frequent or exclusive use of the Hebrew alphabet.

Office/computer technology, fonts and standards

Typewriters

There is not much information on the adaptation of typewriters to African language needs (apart from Arabic, and the African languages that do not use any modified Latin letters). There were apparently some typewriters fitted with keys for typing Nigerian languages. There was at least one IBM Selectric typewriter "typeball" developed for some African languages (including Fula).

Around 1930, the English typewriter was modified by Ayana Birru of Ethiopia to type an incomplete and ligated version of the Amharic alphabet.[29]

The 1982 proposal for a unicase version of the African reference alphabet made by Michael Mann and David Dalby included a suggested typewriter adaptation.[30]

Early computing and fonts

With early desktop computers it was possible to modify existing 8-bit Latin fonts to accommodate specialized character needs. This was done without any kind of system or standardization, meaning incompatibility of encodings.

Similarly, there were diverse efforts (successful, but not standardized) to enable use of Ethiopic/Ge'ez on computers.

Current standards

There was never any ISO 8859 standard for any African languages apart from ISO 8859-6 for (standard) Arabic. One standard – ISO 6438 for bibliographic purposes – was adopted but apparently little used (curiously, although this was adopted at about the same time as the African reference alphabet, there were some differences between the two, indicating perhaps a lack of communication between efforts to harmonize transcription of African languages and the ISO standards process).

Unicode in principle resolves the issue of incompatible encoding, but other questions such as the handling of diacritics in extended Latin scripts are still being raised. These in turn relate to fundamental decisions regarding orthographies of African languages.

In recent years, Osmanya, Tifinagh and N'Ko have been added to Unicode, as have individual characters to other ranges, such as Latin and Arabic. Efforts to encode other African scripts, including minority scripts and major historical writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphs, are being coordinated by the Script Encoding Initiative.

Notes
  1. Elechi, O. Oko (2006). Doing justice without the state: the Afikpo (Ehugbo) Nigeria model. CRC Press. p. 98. ISBN 0-415-97729-0.
  2. Diringer, David (1953). The alphabet: a key to the history of mankind. Philosophical Library. pp. 148–149.
  3. Gregersen, Edgar A. (1977). Language in Africa: an introductory survey. CRC Press. p. 176. ISBN 0-677-04380-5.
  4. Slogar, Christopher (Spring 2007). "Early ceramics from Calabar, Nigeria: Towards a history of Nsibidi". African Arts. University of California. 40 (1): 18–29. doi:10.1162/afar.2007.40.1.18.
  5. Slogar, Christopher (2005). Eyo, Ekpo (ed.). Iconography and Continuity in West Africa: Calabar Terracottas and the Arts of the Cross River Region of Nigeria/Cameroon (PDF). University of Maryland. pp. 58–62.
  6. http://www.stlawu.edu/gallery/education/f/09textiles/adinkra_symbols.pdf
  7. "History and Origin of Adinkra Symbols". 25 April 2015.
  8. Appiah, Kwame Anthony (1993). In my father's house : Africa in the philosophy of culture (1st paperback edition 1993. ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-506852-8.
  9. "On mathematical elements in the Tchokwe "Sona" tradition Gerdes, Paulus. 1990. For the Learning of Mathematics10(1), 31–34". Historia Mathematica. 18 (2): 198. 1991. doi:10.1016/0315-0860(91)90542-6. ISSN 0315-0860.
  10. Gerhard Kubik 2006, p. 1.
  11. Laitin (1977:86–87)
  12. Hayward and Hassan, "The Oromo Orthography of Shaykh Bakri Saṗalō", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 44 (1981), p. 551
  13. "Mwangwego". Omniglot.com. 1997-04-07. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  14. "Isibheqe Sohlamvu: An Indigenous Writing System for Southern Bantu Languages" (PDF). linguistics.org.za. 2015-06-22. Retrieved 2015-08-28.
  15. "IsiBheqe". isibheqe.org. 2015-08-23. Retrieved 2015-08-28.
  16. Writing Systems of West Africa
  17. Writing Systems of Central Africa
  18. "Bamum syllabary and language". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  19. Dalby, Andrew (1998). Dictionary of Languages. Columbia University Press.
  20. "Bassa language and alphabet". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  21. http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/endangeredarch/tuchscherer.html; http://www.afrikanistik-online.de/archiv/2009/1912/
  22. Everson, Michael (26 April 2012). "Preliminary proposal for encoding the Garay script in the SMP of the UCS" (PDF). UC Berkeley Script Encoding Initiative (Universal Scripts Project)/International Organization for Standardization. Retrieved 5 July 2015.
  23. "Kpelle syllabary". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  24. "Loma syllabary". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  25. "Mende syllabary, pronunciationa and language". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  26. "N'Ko alphabet and the Maninka, Bambara, Dyula languages". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  27. "Vai syllabary". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  28. The Phoenicians, Donald Harden, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971 (1962) pp. 105-113
  29. "Engineer Ayana Birru". Ethiopic.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  30. "The "international niamey keyboard" Layout". Scripts.sil.org. 2006-10-31. Retrieved 2013-11-26.

References
  • CISSE, Mamadou. 2006. Ecrits et écritures en Afrique de l'Ouest. Sudlangues n°6. http://www.sudlangues.sn/spip.php?article101
  • Dalby, David. 1967. A survey of the indigenous scripts of Liberia and Sierra Leone: Vai, Mende, Kpelle, and Bassa. African Language Studies 8:1-51.
  • Dalby, David. 1968. The indigenous scripts of West Africa and Surinam: their inspiration and design. African Language Studies 9:156-197.
  • Dalby, David. 1969. Further indigenous scripts of West Africa: Manding, Wolof, and Fula alphabets and Yoruba holy-writing. African Language Studies 10:161-191
  • Mafundikwa, Saki. 2004. Afrikan alphabets: the story of writing in Afrika. West New York, NJ: Mark Batty. ISBN 0-9724240-6-7
  • Hayward, Richard J. and Mohammed Hassan. 1981. The Oromo Orthography of Shaykh Bakri Sapalo. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 44.3:550-556.
  • Pasch, Helma. 2008. Competing scripts: the introduction of the Roman alphabet in Africa. International Journal for the Sociology of Language 191:65-109.
  • Savage, Andrew. 2008. Writing Tuareg — the three script options. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 192: 5-14.
  • Tuchscherer, Konrad. 1999. The lost script of the Bagam. African Affairs 98:55-77.
  • Wyrod, Christopher. 2008. A social orthography of identity: the N’ko literacy movement in West Africa. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 192:27-44.
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