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. In fact, Africans have made use of symbols and writing in various ways in different parts of the continent for a long time. Indeed, since the vast majority of writing systems around the world may be traced to origins in Egyptian hieroglyphs, it could reasonably be argued that writing itself is originally an African invention.

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

ymbols and ideograms

As in the cultures of other regions, the use of meaningful symbols in Africa is well established, those these are not considered "scripts". Some of these have or have had particular customary uses. Nsibidi in what is now southern Nigeria is one example.

The Nsibidi set of symbols [http://www.carlos.emory.edu/ODYSSEY/AFRICA/AF_com_nsibidi.html] is independent of Roman, Latin or Arabic influence and a completely indigenous creation of these peoples. Today, not much is known about Nsibidi because it was used almost exclusively by the now, largely extinct secret societies that regulated social activities in the community. Only members initiated into the secret society knew the symbols, which were mainly used for ritual and ceremonial purposes.

This presents a serious challenge to contemporary research as secret societies in Nigeria were almost completely wiped out as a result of Colonization. Upon attainment of independence, successive Nigerian governments held negative views about secret societies, seeing these as a threat to its own legitimacy, hence, unsurprisingly, there has been continued and largely successful efforts to repress such organizations.

Indigenous writing systems

Ancient Egyptian and Meroitic

Perhaps the most famous writing system of the African continent is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. These developed later into forms known as Hieratic and Demotic. Still later in ancient history, this system was adapted to the Meroitic script in the upper Nile valley.

Tifinagh

The Tifinagh alphabet is often assumed to be derived originally from the Phoenician alphabet. It is still actively used to varying degrees in traditional 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

The Ge'ez script is an abugida that was developed in the Horn of Africa for writing the Ge'ez language. The script is used today in Ethiopia and Eritrea for Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, and several other languages. It sometimes called "Ethiopic", and is known in Ethiopia as the "fidel" or "abugida" (the actual origin of the 21st century linguistic term "abugida", which western linguists apply to scripts of India).Ge'ez 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 Ge'ez, Amharic, and Tigrinya, punctuation and numerals.

Osmanya

Osmanya is a writing script for the Somali language invented in the early 20th century by the Sultan of Hobyo's brother, Osman Yuusuf Keenadiid of the Majeerteen clan. Though no longer the official writing script in Somalia, Osmanya has experienced a resurgence of interest in recent years, as young Somalis have lobbied to reinstate it as the country's national writing script.

The Osmanya script is available in the Unicode range 10480-104AF [from U+10480 - U+104AF (66688–66735)] .

Other Indigenous Writing Systems

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 alphabet and the Latin alphabet.

The Vai syllabary was invented by Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ for writing the Vai language in what is now Liberia during the early 19th century. It is still used.

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 is rarely used today, but a fair amount of material written in this script still exists.

The Mende Ki-ka-ku or KiKaKui syllabary was invented by Kisimi Kamara in Sierra Leone in the early 20th century. It is still used.

N'Ko was invented in 1949 by Solomana Kante in Guinea, primarily for the Manding languages. It is apparently in increasing use in West Africa, including some efforts to adapt it to other languages (Wyrod 2008).

Mandombe was invented by Wabeladio Payi in 1978 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is apparently promoted by the Kimbanguist Church and used for writing Kikongo, Lingala, Tshiluba, Swahili, and other languages.

There was also a traditional script used by the Bagam (Tuchscherer 1999). [http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/endangeredarch/tuchscherer.html]

Introduced and adapted writing systems

Phoenician/Punic

The Phoenicians from what is now Lebanon traded with North Africans and founded cities there, the most famous Carthage. The Phoenician alphabet is thought to be the origin of many others, including: Arabic, Greek and Latin. The Carthaginian dialect is called Punic. [The Phoenicians, Donald Harden, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971 (1962) pp. 105-113] Today's Tifinagh is descended from Punic.

Greek

The Greek alphabet was adapted in Egypt to the Coptic alphabet and language (which is today only a liturgical language). The latter alphabet was in turn adapted to what is now called the Old Nubian alphabet, with the addition of a few letters derived from ancient Meroitic.

Arabic

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's 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

The first systematic attempts to adapt the Latin script to African languages were probably those of Christian missionaries on the eve of European colonization. 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 alphabet 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 do 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.

Proposed but not used writing systems

Over the years there have been other alphabets proposed for writing one or more African language that have either never been actively used or used only briefly. One example is Bakri Sapalo's Oromo syllabary (Hayward and Hassan 1981).

Office/Computer Technology and Writing African Languages

Typewriters

There is not much information on the adaptaton of typewriters to African language needs (apart from Arabic, and of course those 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. [http://www.ethiopic.com/Ayana_Birru.htm]

The 1982 proposal for a unicase version of the African reference alphabet made by Michael Mann and David Dalby included a proposed typewriter adaptation. [http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=IntlNiameyKybd]

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.

References

*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: 0972424067
*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.

External links

* [http://www.panafril10n.org/wikidoc/pmwiki.php/PanAfrLoc/WritingSystems PanAfriL10n page on Writing systems of Africa]
*fr icon [http://sumale.vjf.cnrs.fr/phono/PhonologieN.php Systèmes alphabétiques des langues africaines]
* [http://www.ethiopic.com/Ayana_Birru.htm Engineer Ayana Birru of Ethiopia]
* [http://www.library.cornell.edu/africana/Writing_Systems/Welcome.html African Writing Systems]
* [http://mygrandfathersworld.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=32 Tuchscherer's article on Bagam script]
* [http://www.rbardalzo.narod.ru/4/afrikan.html Phenomenon of the African idea of the written language]