The Pan-Nigerian alphabet is a set of 33 Latin letters standardised by the National Language Centre of

Nigeria Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...

in the 1980s. It is intended to be sufficient to write all the

languages of Nigeria There are over 525 native languages spoken in Nigeria. The Nigerian official language is English, the language of former colonial British Nigeria. As reported in 2003, Nigerian Pidgin was spoken as a second language by 60 million people in Nige ...

without using digraphs.

History

Several hundred different languages are spoken in Nigeria. The different

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

s made the use of typewriters impractical. In the 1980s the National Language Centre (NLC) undertook to develop a single alphabet suitable for writing all the languages of the country and replacing use of

Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and the ...

in some

Nigerian languages There are over 525 native languages spoken in Nigeria. The Nigerian official language is English, the language of former colonial British Nigeria. As reported in 2003, Nigerian Pidgin was spoken as a second language by 60 million people in Nige ...

that were proposed in the colonial era, taking as its starting point a model proposed by linguist

Kay Williamson Kay Williamson (January 26, 1935, Hereford, United Kingdom – January 3, 2005, Brazil), born Ruth Margaret Williamson, was a linguist who specialised in the study of African languages, particularly those of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, where ...

in 1981. The font family was developed in 1985-86 by Edward Oguejofor and Victor Manfredi, in co-operation with the NLC, with technical assistance from Hermann Zapf.

Characters

If a Unicode font is installed with the Pan-Nigerian glyphs, then a table, such as the one below, should be seen:
The

acute Acute may refer to: Science and technology * Acute angle ** Acute triangle ** Acute, a leaf shape in the glossary of leaf morphology * Acute (medicine), a disease that it is of short duration and of recent onset. ** Acute toxicity, the adverse eff ...

( ´ ),

grave A grave is a location where a dead body (typically that of a human, although sometimes that of an animal) is buried or interred after a funeral. Graves are usually located in special areas set aside for the purpose of burial, such as grave ...

( ` ) and

circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...

( ˆ ) accents are also used to mark High, Low, and Falling tone respectively. Mid tone (in languages which contrast High, Mid, and Low) is left unmarked.

Keyboard

The following typewriter keyboard was produced for the NLC by

Olivetti Olivetti S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of computers, tablets, smartphones, printers and other such business products as calculators and fax machines. Headquartered in Ivrea, in the Metropolitan City of Turin, the company has been part of ...

: On this typewriter keyboard layout the letters Q and X were not mapped as they were not part of the alphabet, and digits 0 or 1 had to be entered as capital letters O and I. Keys in grey (for modern computers) were missing. On modern keyboard for computers, the distinctive digits 0 and 1 are placed on the unshifted positions of keys of first row (like other digits), the letter Q is mapped like on standard QWERTY layouts, but dead keys at start of the first and second row need to be moved to the 102nd key on start of the first row (reducing the width of the left shift key), and to the shifted position of the new key assigned to digit 0 on the first row. In all cases, the Enter key may vary between this L-shaped key on two rows, and the horizontal key on the third row only (moving the key assigned to letter Ǝ to the end of the second row).

Mobile devices

Some onscreen smartphone keyboards like

Swiftkey Microsoft SwiftKey is a virtual keyboard app originally developed by TouchType for Android and iOS devices. It was first released for Android in July 2010, followed by an iOS release in September 2014 after Apple implemented third-party keyb ...

, Touchpal, Multiling and African keyboards have full support for Pan-Nigerian alphabets.

Notes and references

{{Languages of Nigeria Latin alphabets Writing systems of Africa * Multilingual orthographies Keyboard layouts Writing systems introduced in 1985

History

Characters

Keyboard

Mobile devices

See also

Notes and references