The Adlam script is a script used to write

Fulani The Fula, Fulani, or Fulɓe people ( ff, Fulɓe, ; french: Peul, links=no; ha, Fulani or Hilani; pt, Fula, links=no; wo, Pël; bm, Fulaw) are one of the largest ethnic groups in the Sahel and West Africa, widely dispersed across the region. ...

. The name ''Adlam'' is an acronym derived from the first four letters of the alphabet (A, D, L, M), standing for ''Alkule Dandayɗe Leñol Mulugol'' (), which means "the alphabet that protects the peoples from vanishing". It is one of many indigenous scripts developed for specific languages in West Africa. Adlam is supported in Google's Android and Chrome operating systems. There are also Android apps to send

SMS Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...

in Adlam and to learn the alphabet.Winden Jangen Adlam: Cellphone Applications
/ref> On computers running Microsoft Windows, the Adlam script was natively supported beginning with

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...

version 1903, which was released in May 2019. On

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

, the Adlam Script was natively supported beginning with Ventura in 2022.

Development

While teenagers in the late 1980s, brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry devised the alphabetic script to transcribe the Fulani language. 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 the United States.

Letters

Adlam has both upper and lower cases. They are written from right to left. The letters are found either joined akin to

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

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.

Diacritics

Adlam has a number of

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...

s. 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 in Arabic script, Adlam digits go in the same direction (right to left) as letters, as in the

N'Ko script N'Ko () is a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949, as a modern writing system for the Mandé languages of West Africa. The term ''N'Ko'', which means ''I say'' in all Mandé languages, is also used for the Mandé literary standard writt ...

Punctuation

Adlam punctuation is like

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

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

Unicode

The Adlam alphabet was added to the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

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

References

External links

Winden Jangen
an organisation promoting Adlam *

; Randall M. Hasson

with a video pronouncing the basic letters
Adlam virtual keyboard

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 {{List of writing systems Fula language Alphabets Writing systems of Africa 1989 introductions Right-to-left writing systems Constructed scripts