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History

While Osmanya gained reasonable acceptance for correspondence and bookkeeping at the local level, it met fierce resistance as a national script for several reasons: it was identified with the Majeerteen clan, who supported the Italian colonial government, rather than with the Somali nation as a whole [a view that has changed somewhat in the 21st century], there was opposition to making Somali rather than Arabic the official language of the country, and in addition there was opposition to using any indigenous script rather than either the Arabic script, long used for writing Arabic in Somalia, or the Latin script.⁴⁵⁶

After independence a governmental commission was set up to decide on an official writing system for Somali. It favored Kaddare script, but judged it to be impractical for a developing nation. In October 1972 the Somali Latin alphabet was adopted as the official writing system for Somali because of its simplicity, ability to cope with all of the sounds in the language, and the widespread existence of machines and typewriters designed for the Latin script.⁷⁸⁹ The administration of President Mohamed Siad Barre subsequently launched a massive literacy campaign designed to ensure its adoption, which led to a sharp decline in use of Osmanya.

Description

The direction of reading and writing in Osmanya is from left to right, as in Latin script. Capitalization is sporadic.

Long vowels were originally written either double or with consonants, as in Arabic, but later ligatures were developed from the double vowels.

The ATR/RTR distinction is not marked in vowels, except occasionally in the 21st century with a diaeresis for ATR vowels, as is occasionally done also in Latin script.

The article and determiner suffixes are written separately from the noun, which retains its underlying form. Assimilation is however shown on the article/determiner itself [feminine -ta, masculine -ka]. Thus hooyada 'the mother' is written ⟨hooyo da⟩; hasha 'the she-camel' is written ⟨hal sha⟩. When the k of -ka elides, it is marked with an apostrophe, which was borrowed from Latin script. Thus dhinaca 'the side' is written ⟨dhinac'a⟩.

Letters

The order of the alphabet is not completely fixed, as only letters that correspond to Arabic script are consistently written in that order. The letter 𐒀 alef, which had been used to mark long vowels as well as glottal stop, was dropped around the time letters were added for aa, ee, oo, and w, y came to be used for uu, ii. The order below is -- apart from the anachronistic retention of the letter alef -- as written by the inventor's son Yaasiin, though various other orders are attested.¹⁰

Digits

The system is decimal:

Although some of these digits may look identical to various letters, this is not true for all fonts.

Unicode

Main article: Osmanya (Unicode block)

Osmanya was added to the Unicode Standard in April 2003 with the release of version 4.0. Capitalization is not supported.

The Unicode block for Osmanya is U+10480–U+104AF:

See also

• Kaddare script
• Somali alphabets

Notes

• I.M. Lewis (1958) Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 21 pp 134–156.

External links

• Osmanya, Borama, Wadaad's writing and the Somali language
• Afkeenna iyo fartiisa - a book in Osmanya
• Somali Native Alphabet
• The report of the Somali Language Committee
• Unicode assignments for Osmanya characters
• Osmanya Unicode Fonts
• Osmanya online keyboard - Lexilogos
• Somali Osmaniya Transliterator

References

1. Dadweynaha, Somalia Wasaaradda Warfaafinta iyo Hanuuninta (1974). The Writing of the Somali Language: A Great Landmark in Our Revolutionary History. Ministry of Information and National Guidance. p. 5. https://books.google.com/books?id=v-GwAAAAIAAJ ↩

2. Dadweynaha, Somalia Wasaaradda Warfaafinta iyo Hanuuninta (1974). The Writing of the Somali Language: A Great Landmark in Our Revolutionary History. Ministry of Information and National Guidance. p. 16. https://books.google.com/books?id=v-GwAAAAIAAJ ↩

3. Tosco, Mauro (2015). "Djibouti: AGA" (PDF). The Intergovernmental Academy of Somali Language: 196–197. https://arcadia.sba.uniroma3.it/bitstream/2307/5706/1/Short%20notes%20on%20Somali%20previous%20scripts_Mauro%20Tosco.pdf ↩

4. Tosco, Mauro (2015). "Djibouti: AGA" (PDF). The Intergovernmental Academy of Somali Language: 196–197. https://arcadia.sba.uniroma3.it/bitstream/2307/5706/1/Short%20notes%20on%20Somali%20previous%20scripts_Mauro%20Tosco.pdf ↩

5. Abdullahi, Mohamed Diriye (2001). Culture and Customs of Somalia. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 73. ISBN 978-0-313-31333-2. 978-0-313-31333-2 ↩

6. Lewis, I. M. (1999). A Pastoral Democracy: A Study of Pastoralism and Politics Among the Northern Somali of the Horn of Africa. James Currey Publishers. ISBN 978-0-85255-280-3. 978-0-85255-280-3 ↩

7. Andrew Simpson, Language and National Identity in Africa, (Oxford University Press: 2008), p.288 ↩

8. Economist Intelligence Unit (Great Britain), Middle East annual review, (1975), p.229 ↩

9. Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi, Culture and Customs of Somalia, (Greenwood Press: 2001), p.73 ↩

10. Tosco 2010 Somali writings, p 13 ff https://journals.ub.uni-koeln.de/index.php/AAeo/article/view/3542/3761 ↩