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Outlook - The brothers who created an alphabet

bbc.co.uk

Development

While they were teenagers in the late 1980s, brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry devised the alphabetic script to transcribe the Fulani language.⁵⁶ One method they used involved them closing their eyes and drawing lines. After looking at their drawn shapes, they would pick which ones would look the most to them like a good glyph for a letter, and associate it with whatever sound they felt it would represent. Another method involved is thinking of a sound, imagining the look of a glyph for that sound, and drawing said glyph.⁷ After several years of development it began to be widely adopted among Fulani communities, and is currently taught not only regionally in Guinea, Nigeria, and Liberia but even as far as Europe and North America.⁸ In 2019, the character shapes were refined after practical usage.⁹

Letters

Adlam has both upper and lower cases. They are written from right to left.¹⁰

The letters are found either joined (akin to Arabic) or separate. The joined form is commonly used in a cursive manner; however, separate or block forms are also used as primarily for educational content.¹³

Diacritics

Adlam has a number of diacritics. The 'consonant' modifier is used to derive additional consonants, mostly from Arabic, similar to e.g. s > š in Latin script.

Usage of the consonant modifier:

Usage of the dot to represent sounds borrowed from Arabic:

Use of the dot with native letters:

Digits

Unlike the Arabic script, Adlam digits go in the same direction (right to left) as letters, as in the N'Ko script.

Punctuation

Adlam punctuation is like Spanish in that there are initial and final forms of the question mark and exclamation mark, which are placed before and after the questioned or exclaimed clause or phrase. The final forms are taken from the Arabic script.¹⁴[better source needed] The shape of the initial marks changed in 2019 as part of the efforts for Unicode standardization.¹⁵

The hyphen is used for word breaks, and there are both parentheses and double parentheses.

Unicode

Main article: Adlam (Unicode block)

The Adlam alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2016 with the release of version 9.0. The Unicode block for Adlam is U+1E900–U+1E95F:

Further reading

• Aysha Sow (2021). Adlam Alphabet Learning Guide in ten lessons (PDF). Winden Jangen.

External links

• Winden Jangen, an organisation promoting Adlam
• The Adlam Story – How Alphabet Changes Culture Archived 2018-08-21 at the Wayback Machine; Randall M. Hasson
• Adlam at Omniglot, with a video pronouncing the basic letters
• Adlam virtual keyboard
• Latin-Adlam Transliterator
• The ADLaM Alphabet for Our People - Talks at Google session guested by Barry brothers explaining the origins of their script
• The brothers who created an alphabet - story from the BBC World Service

References

1. Dalby, Andrew (1998). Dictionary of Languages. Columbia University Press. /wiki/Andrew_Dalby ↩

2. Everson, Michael (28 October 2014). "N4628R: Revised proposal for encoding the Adlam script in the SMP of the UCS" (PDF). Retrieved 22 June 2016. /wiki/Michael_Everson ↩

3. Unseth, Peter. 2011. Invention of Scripts in West Africa for Ethnic Revitalization. In The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts, ed. by Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García, pp. 23–32. New York: Oxford University Press. ↩

4. Winden Jangen Adlam: Cellphone Applications http://www.windenjangen.org/adlam_apps ↩

5. Everson, Michael (28 October 2014). "N4628R: Revised proposal for encoding the Adlam script in the SMP of the UCS" (PDF). Retrieved 22 June 2016. /wiki/Michael_Everson ↩

6. Waddell, Kaveh (16 November 2016). "The Alphabet That Will Save a People From Disappearing". The Atlantic. /w/index.php?title=Kaveh_Waddell&action=edit&redlink=1 ↩

7. The ADLaM Alphabet for Our People | Abdoulaye + More | Talks at Google, retrieved 2023-01-27 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPQ7ufjN2i8 ↩

8. Bach, Deborah; Lerner, Sara (July 29, 2019). "Adlam Comes Online". Microsoft. Retrieved August 18, 2019. https://news.microsoft.com/stories/people/adlam.html ↩

9. Patel, Neil; Jamra, Mark; Cornelius, Craig; Barry, Ibrahima; Barry, Abdoulaye (19 April 2019). "Replacement of Adlam Reference Font in Codesheet to Updated Design" (PDF). Retrieved 16 January 2023. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19119r-adlam-font-repl.pdf ↩

10. "Can an alphabet save a culture?". Microsoft Unlocked. Retrieved 2022-08-26. https://unlocked.microsoft.com/adlam-can-an-alphabet-save-a-culture/ ↩

11. Everson, Michael (28 October 2014). "N4628R: Revised proposal for encoding the Adlam script in the SMP of the UCS" (PDF). Retrieved 22 June 2016. /wiki/Michael_Everson ↩

12. "Adlam alphabet". skyknowledge.com. Retrieved 2019-08-08. http://skyknowledge.com/adlam.htm ↩

13. "Adlam/Pular script notes". r12a.github.io. https://r12a.github.io/scripts/adlam/#writing_styles ↩

14. "Adlam/Pular orthography notes". r12a.github.io. 5 January 2023. Retrieved 16 January 2023. https://r12a.github.io/scripts/adlm/fuf.html#inline ↩

15. Patel, Neil; Jamra, Mark; Cornelius, Craig; Barry, Ibrahima; Barry, Abdoulaye (19 April 2019). "Replacement of Adlam Reference Font in Codesheet to Updated Design" (PDF). Retrieved 16 January 2023. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19119r-adlam-font-repl.pdf ↩