The Nwagu Aneke script is a
syllabary
In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words.
A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optiona ...
and some
logographs that was developed by Nwagu Aneke for the
Umuleri
Umueri, also known and pronounced as Umuleri, is an ancient town in the Anambra State of Southeastern Nigeria. The people of Umueri belong to the Igbo ethnic group, and the town has an estimated population of 1,500,000. It is located within the A ...
dialect of
Igbo
Igbo may refer to:
* Igbo people, an ethnic group of Nigeria
* Igbo language, their language
* anything related to Igboland, a cultural region in Nigeria
See also
* Ibo (disambiguation)
* Igbo mythology
* Igbo music
* Igbo art
*
* Igbo-Ukwu, a ...
in the late 1950s. Aneke, a successful land owner and diviner, claimed to have had no prior reading or writing skills, and that he was inspired by spirits who revealed the characters to him. The script does not have any vowels but is similar to other West African scripts invented in the 19th and 20th centuries such as the
Vai syllabary
The Vai syllabary is a syllabic writing system devised for the Vai language by Momolu Duwalu Bukele of Jondu, in what is now Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia. Bukele is regarded within the Vai community, as well as by most scholars, as the s ...
because it has characters for sounds that are not in the Latin script. Aneke had written over 100 textbooks worth of anti-colonial commentary works and diary entries such as ''The Spirits Implore Me to Record All They Have Taught Me'' and ''I Went Round the World'' before his death in 1991.
References
{{List of writing systems
Igbo language
Writing systems of Africa
Syllabary writing systems