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Writing systems of Africa

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Egyptian hieroglyphs

The writing systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of writing systems on the African continent, both indigenous and those introduced. In many African societies, history generally used to be recorded orally despite most societies having developed a writing script, leading to them being termed "oral civilisations" in contrast to "literate civilisations".

Today, the Latin script is commonly encountered across Africa, especially in the Western, Central and Southern Africa regions. Arabic script is mainly used in North Africa and Ge'ez script is widely used in the Horn of Africa. Regionally and in some localities, other scripts may be of significant importance.

While writing from North Africa is among the oldest in the world, native writings and scripts in Subsaharan Africa are generally modern developments. This is not to say writing was not present there prior to modern times; Tifinagh has been used by the Tuareg people since antiquity, as has the Geʽez script and its derivatives in the Horn of Africa. Other groups have encountered the Latin and Arabic scripts for centuries, but rarely adopted them in a widespread manner until the 19th century as they simply did not find them necessary for their own societies (Ajamiyya writing being a notable exception).

Indigenous writing systems

Ancient African orthographies

Bilingual and biscriptal "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 created 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 Eritrea and Ethiopia as the fidel or abugida.

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", "nchibiddi", and "nchibiddy") 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. 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 (and possibly earlier, 2000 BC) to 1400 CE.

Adinkra

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (August 2019)

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. 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".

All 45 Characters of Adinkra Alphabet

Adinkra iconography has been adapted into several segmental scripts, including

  • The Adinkra Alphabet, invented by Charles Korankye in 2015, and expanded and refined over the next several years to accommodate various languages spoken in Ghana and Ivory Coast such as Akan, Dagbani, Ewe and Ga- a process that culminated with the creation of a standardized font in 2020.
  • Adinkra Nkyea, a writing system based on the Adinkra symbols.. Some Ghanaians use the Adinkra Nkyea writing system for the Akan Language and its dialects. A Majority of Adinkra Nkyea is derived from the original Adinkra Symbols. Adinkra Nkyea contains some 39 characters, ten numerals, and three punctuation marks.
    All Adinkra Characters of Adinkra Nkyea

Lusona

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (August 2019)

Lusona is a system of ideograms that functioned as mnemonic devices to record proverbs, fables, games, riddles and animals, and to transmit knowledge. They originate in what is now eastern Angola, northwestern Zambia and adjacent areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Modern orthographies

East Africa

The Kaddare alphabet
  • An alphasyllabic script for Oromo in Ethiopia was invented in the late 1950s by Sheikh Bakri Sapalo (1895-1980), and saw limited use.
  • An alphabetic script called Nilerian has been invented by Aleu Majok for Dinka and other languages of South Sudan.

Southern Africa

Central Africa

West Africa

There are various other writing systems native to West Africa and Central Africa. 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:

North Africa

Tifinagh (Tuareg Berber language: ⵜⴼⵏⵗ; Neo-Tifinagh: ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ; Berber Latin alphabet: Tifinaɣ; Berber pronunciation: ) is a script used to write the Berber languages. Tifinagh is descended from the ancient Libyco-Berber alphabet. The traditional Tifinagh, sometimes called Tuareg Tifinagh, is still favored by the Tuareg Berbers of the Sahara desert in southern Algeria, northeastern Mali, northern Niger and northern Burkina Faso for use writing the Tuareg Berber language. Neo-Tifinagh is an alphabet developed by Berber Academy to adopt Tuareg Tifinagh for use with Kabyle; it has been since modified for use across North Africa.

Tifinagh alphabet

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. 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's 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's writing. Despite the existence of a widely known and well-established script in Ethiopia and Eritrea there are a few cases where Muslims in Ethiopia and Eritrea 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

Though the Latin Script was used to write Latin throughout Roman Africa and a handful of Latin-script inscriptions in the Punic language (more commonly written in the Phoenician script, as noted above) also survive, the first systematic attempts to adapt it 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 Lepsius Standard Alphabet (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.

Braille

Braille, a tactile script widely used by the visually impaired, has been adapted to write several African languages- including those of Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia.

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. Typewriters for the Geez script, used in Ethiopia and Eritrea, were mass produced by Olivetti starting in the 1950s.

The 1982 proposal for a unicase version of the African Reference Alphabet made by Michael Mann and David Dalby included a suggested typewriter adaptation.

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-Eritrean /Ge'ez on computers. The earliest computer output of the Fidel was developed for a nine-pin dot matrix printer in 1983, by a team that included people from the Bible Society of Ethiopia, churches, and missions. The first item published with this system was a Christian song book, እንዘምር.

Current standards

There was never any ISO 8859 standard for any native African languages. 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.

A number of contemporary and historic African scripts including Adlam, Bamum, Bassa Vah, Coptic, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Garay, Ge'ez, Medefaidrin, Mende Ki-ka-ku, Meroitic, N'Ko, Osmanya, Tifinagh, and Vai are currently included in the Unicode standard, as are individual characters to other ranges of languages used, such as Latin and Arabic. Efforts to encode African scripts, including minority scripts and major historical writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphs, are being coordinated by the Script Encoding Initiative.

See also

Notes

  1. This characterisation has come under criticism by some African scholars, as it implies conflict between the oral and written. They instead contend that in reality, the characterisation is defined by the interaction between three ways of expression and diffusion: the oral, the written, and the printed word.

References

  1. "Orality". Encyclopedia of African Religions and Philosophy. Springer. 2022.
  2. Vansina, Jan (1971). "Once upon a Time: Oral Traditions as History in Africa". Daedalus. 100 (2). MIT Press: 442–468. JSTOR 20024011.
  3. General History of Africa: Volume 1 Methodology and African Historiography, chapters 1-10. UNESCO Publishing. 1981.
  4. Elechi, O. Oko (2006). Doing justice without the state: the Afikpo (Ehugbo) Nigeria model. CRC Press. p. 98. ISBN 0-415-97729-0.
  5. Diringer, David (1953). The alphabet: a key to the history of mankind. Philosophical Library. pp. 148–149.
  6. Gregersen, Edgar A. (1977). Language in Africa: an introductory survey. CRC Press. p. 176. ISBN 0-677-04380-5.
  7. Hales, Kevin (2015). The Moving Finger: A Rhetorical, Grammatological and Afrinographic Exploration of Nsibidi in Nigeria and Cameroon (Doctoral dissertation). Ohio University. p. 15.
  8. Slogar, Christopher (Spring 2007). "Early ceramics from Calabar, Nigeria: Towards a history of Nsibidi". African Arts. 40 (1). University of California: 18–29. doi:10.1162/afar.2007.40.1.18. S2CID 57566625.
  9. 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.
  10. "Adinkra - Cultural Symbols of the Asante people" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-08-27. Retrieved 2019-08-18.
  11. "History and Origin of Adinkra Symbols". 25 April 2015.
  12. 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.
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  14. Korankye, Charles (August 15, 2020). "Adinkra" (PDF). Unicode. Unicode Technical Committee. Retrieved 17 September 2022.
  15. Nkyea, Adinkra. "Adinkra Syllabary". Biswajit Mandal.
  16. Gerdes, Paulus (1990). "On mathematical elements in the Tchokwe "Sona" tradition". For the Learning of Mathematics. 10 (1): 31–34. JSTOR 40247972.
  17. Kubik 2006, p. 1.
  18. Laitin (1977:86–87)
  19. Hayward and Hassan, "The Oromo Orthography of Shaykh Bakri Saṗalō", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 44 (1981), p. 551
  20. "The New Muonjang (Dinka) Script"
  21. "Mwangwego". Omniglot.com. 1997-04-07. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  22. "Isibheqe Sohlamvu: An Indigenous Writing System for Southern Bantu Languages" (PDF). linguistics.org.za. 2015-06-22. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2015-08-28.
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  24. "Chapter 19: Africa, Bamum" (PDF). The Unicode Standard, Version 10.0. Mountain View, California: Unicode, Inc. July 2017. ISBN 978-1-936213-16-0.
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  27. Pasch, Helma. 2008. Competing scripts: the introduction of the Roman alphabet in Africa. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 191:65–109.
  28. Priest, Lorna A (29 July 2008). "Preliminary proposal to encode Beria Giray Erfe (or Beria Branding Script)" (PDF). Retrieved 18 July 2022.
  29. Issa, Siddick Adam (2004). "Alphabet Beria (Zaghaoua)" (PDF).
  30. Writing Systems of West Africa
  31. Writing Systems of Central Africa
  32. Unseth, Peter. 2011. Invention of scripts in West Africa for ethnic revitalization. In The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts, (Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, Volume 2.), ed. by Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García, pp. 23-32. New York: Oxford University Press.
  33. Dalby, Andrew (1998). Dictionary of Languages. Columbia University Press.
  34. ^ Dalby, David (1969). "Further Indigenous Scripts of West Africa: Manding, Wolof and Fula Alphabets and Yoruba 'Holy' Writing". African Language Studies. X. University of London. School of Oriental and African Studies: 161–181.
  35. "Bassa language and alphabet". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  36. 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.
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  38. "Loma syllabary". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  39. "Mende syllabary, pronunciations and language". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  40. "N'Ko alphabet and the Maninka, Bambara, Dyula languages". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  41. "Vai syllabary". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  42. "Yoruba Sacred Texts | Paganism". The Wild Hunt. 2008-01-22. Retrieved 2021-05-06.
  43. The Phoenicians, Donald Harden, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971 (1962) pp. 105-113
  44. Chatonnet, Françoise Briquel; Hawley, Robert (2020). Hasselbach-Andee, Rebecca (ed.). A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Language. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781119193296. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  45. Elmayer, A. F. (1984). "The Reinterpretation of Latino-Punic Inscriptions from Roman Tripolitania". Libyan Studies. 15: 93–105. doi:10.1017/S0263718900007561.
  46. Gottreich, Emily (2020). Jewish Morocco: A History from Pre-Islamic to Postcolonial Times. I.B. Tauris. doi:10.5040/9781838603601.ch-001. ISBN 978-1-78076-849-6. S2CID 241423198.
  47. "Engineer Ayana Birru". Ethiopic.com. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
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Sources

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  • Dalby, David. 1969. Further indigenous scripts of West Africa: Manding, Wolof, and Fula alphabets and Yoruba holy-writing. African Language Studies 10:161-191
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  • Kubik, Gerhard (2006). Tusona: Luchazi Ideographs : a Graphic Tradition of West-Central Africa. LIT Verlag Münster. ISBN 978-3-8258-7601-2.
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  • 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.
  • Unseth, Peter. 2016. The international impact of Sequoyah’s Cherokee syllabary. Written Language & Literacy 19(1), pp. 75–93.
  • 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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