Two brothers invented an alphabet for their native language, Fulfulde

As a Fulani, when I was growing up there weren't any official alphabet. Some people wrote in Arabic, other's in the latin letters using french phonetics and agreed upon combinations for those new sounds. (ie Bhe, dhe, etc.) I only know Fulani orally.

But around 2002, if I remember correctly, Guinean students from the University of Azhar in Egypt, started working on a new alphabet. They agreed on using latin letters for familiar sounds, since most of Fulanis speak french anyway. They added new letters for those particularly Fulani sounds.

I remember being there in a small college bedroom where they were all gathered around the computer. It had a Pentium III and they were excited about a new Pentium 4 machine that someone had donated but they didn't get the chance to install it yet. I don't remember if the two brothers were there since those names are extremely common for Fulani (yes, my name is Ibrahima too).

I was there to get a hair cut, and along the way they told me the computer had issues. All I did was go to windows Registry, and delete the files that automatically started at boot.

The script in this article is new to me, never saw it before. I read books in the one they made in Egypt, since it's easy to pick up. In fact, I think when you take an official test in Fulani, it is written in the script from Egypt.

Either way, I'm excited for this and hopefully I'll get to learn it quick enough to teach my own children.

The big point here isn't that these two brothers invented an alphabet — that alone isn't that remarkable — but that it had gained so much acceptance so quickly, and that they are still here to talk to. It sounds like writing in their language in Arabic script is still in a chaotic state where orthographic conventions have not been established, so it's the perfect time for a natively-suited alphabet to come on the scene and take over.

This is great, I love languages and writing systems. My own heritage is Irish so I can see how language and culture are linked so strongly to writing the words to speak the language of that culture.

It's amazing how dismissive we can be too. A friend of mine who is Mi'kmaq (pronounced mig-maw) a First Nations/Native American was showing me ancient glyph symbols of his language. I had been telling him about languages I liked and that's why he showed me the Mi'kmaq alphabet/syllabary for their writing system. They aren't used Latin letters are used but it shows how even me as a fan of languages assumed First Nations peoples in the Americas did not develop writing systems. https://www.omniglot.com/writing/mikmaq.htm

I can spend hours looking at Omniglot.com I strongly recommend it.

The article doesn't really show the alphabet (their picture has the stroke marks overdrawn so it's hard to see). Here's the unicode page with images of all the characters: http://www.unicode.org/errata/Adlam-Ebima-chart-2019-05.pdf

These guys are the modern-day Sequoyah, who invented the writing system for the Cherokee language in the early 1800's

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

"the Fulbhe people never developed a script for their language, instead using Arabic and sometimes Latin characters to write in their native tongue... Many sounds in Fulfulde can’t be represented by either alphabet".

That's not really how alphabets work. English is written in the Roman alphabet not because its sounds are particularly well suited to that alphabet, but because it's the alphabet we had.

It sounds like what Fulfulde was lacking was a standard orthography, not an alphabet of its own.

The alphabet itself and a sample text on Omniglot: https://omniglot.com/writing/adlam.htm

We share the same kind of story in Lebanon. Three friends created not only the alphabet but automated the conjugation using ai. Check the verb conjugation on

http://www.lebaneselanguage.org

http://www.lebaneselanguage.org/language/lebanese-verbs-conj...

So what's the actual benefit of this? Maybe there's something I'm missing but couldn't they just use any alphabet that has enough symbols to represent the sounds in their language? What's actually gained from this?

Why not use the phonetic alphabet? Was it not known yet?

I hesitate to wade into this, since I have a lot of admiration for these two men, and I am only a mediocre speaker of Pulaar, the western dialect spoken by Fulani, whose eastern dialect is Fulfulde. I have seen several variations of this story making the rounds over the last few years, and it is full of misconceptions about the Fulani communities across the Sahel, and more generally about linguistics (and language politics) of trans-national communities. It is unfortunate that in this particular article Microsoft repeats many of the errors of the Atlantic[1], and the Letterform Archive [2], and adds its own self-congratulatory spin to it.

The first misconception is that Pulaar/Fulfulde is/was rarely written. Despite the experiences of the Barry brothers, the language has been written for hundreds of years. There are manuscripts in Arabic script that attest to this - unfortunately these are generally poorly catalogued, but BU's African Ajami Library lists 25 [3] and the British Library has several collections [4]. There is a strong historical argument that the Fulani were actually the primary instigators of literacy in pre-colonial West Africa, from the 15th and 16th centuries. The practice of writing Pulaar/Fulfulde with Arabic script did without question wane in the 20th c. - particularly among the more educated and urban communities which the Barry brothers come from. This led to decreased standardisation of the language as written in the Arabic script, especially as Fulani communities came to have stronger ties to national identities than to their transnational identity as Fulani. At the same time, the general push for literacy in languages written with Latin script in the region (mostly French and English) led to a loss in language prestige for Pulaar/Fulfulde as it had less utility as a lingua franca, and was not the language of religion, trade or politics, in the way it had been.

By the 1990's, however there was substantial linguistic work done on Pulaar/Fulfulde and a modified Latin alphabet was widely in use in the linguistic and academic community, which is currently seen on almost all Wikipedia articles on the subject. This is marked by 'hooked' letters for plosives, as in Fulɓe, which this Microsoft article writes "Fulbhe." The fact that this was not widely enough known that the Barry brothers came across it before developing a new standard for writing is testament to the fragmentation within the Fulani community, but I think it also reflects the fact that they did not come at the issue from a linguistics background. Nonetheless, this pre-existing writing standard does accurately represent all of the sounds in Pulaar/Fulfulde (and also is not much different from many other African languages in the region written with a Latin alphabet). It also was used for printing a number of books in the early 2000s, and I knew of a handful of companies regularly printing books in Pulaar in Dakar, Senegal (where it is also a minority language). I once picked up an order for 10,000 books printed in Pulaar in 2005, typeset in this commonly accepted script adapted from the Latin Alphabet.

The second major misconception of the article, is that a language needs to have its own script to be accurately represented, or that having its own script enhances the literacy rate of a language. Other comments have touched on this, so I won't dwell, but from a linguistic perspective (or even from a software language perspective) the opposite is more likely to be the case. The answer to the proliferation of different standards should almost never be to create a new standard - especially one that is not at all based on the previous standards (as Adlam is based on neither Arabic or Latin abjads/alphabets). Literacy in Pulaar/Fulfulde is almost certainly better served by doubling down on an existing standard that is accessible to those who most want to access it, rather than a new standard. There are 100-150 million Pulaar/Fulfulde speakers, so even success in the range of thousands of Fulani who recognise Adlam doesn't mean it is likely to overtake the actual pragmatic literacy of those hundreds of millions who already ready on a daily basis in Latin scripts, and could easily recognise the adapted letters.

From a political perspective, there might be a value in a new unifying standard that underscores the uniqueness of Fulɓe from their neighbours in Mauritania to Sudan. But in every one of those countries, the Fulɓe are a minority, and many of their communities are nomadic/transhumant as well, further undermining their ability to integrate or oppose existing political structures. While I applaud Adlam as a commendable assertion of identity, and a valuable potential contribution to the linguistics and typography of West African languages (should it engage constructively with the field), it is politically doomed, and unfortunately lends credence to the dictum that "a language is a dialect with an army."

Pulaar/Fulfulde is an incredibly important language, but it hasn't had an army since the fall of the Empire of Sokoto in 1903 to colonial powers. It has largely been seen as a dialect because of that, despite being one of the most widely spoken in Africa (Swahili is the only other African language with a claim to have more than 100 million native speakers).

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-a... [2] https://letterformarchive.org/events/inventing-the-adlam-scr... [3] https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/18688 [4] https://eap.bl.uk/collection/EAP387-1