The Kpelle syllabary was invented c. 1935 by Chief Gbili of Sanoyie, Liberia. It was intended for writing the

Kpelle language The Kpelle language ( endonym: "Kpɛlɛɛ") is spoken by the Kpelle people of Liberia, Guinea and Ivory Coast and is part of the Mande family of languages. Guinean Kpelle (also known as ''Guerze'' in French), spoken by half a million people, ...

, a member of the Mande group of Niger-Congo languages spoken by about 490,000 people in Liberia and around 300,000 people in Guinea at that time. The syllabary consists of 88

graphemes In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called ''graphemic ...

and is written from left to right in horizontal rows. Many of the

glyphs A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

have more than one form. It was used to some extent by speakers of Kpelle in Liberia and Guinea during the 1930s and early 1940s but never achieved popular acceptance. It has been classed as a failed script.Unseth, Peter. 2011. Invention of Scripts in West Africa for Ethnic Revitalization. In ''The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts'', ed. by Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García, pp. 23-32. New York: Oxford University Press. Today Kpelle is written with a version of the

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 th ...

References

Kpelle people Writing systems of Africa Writing systems introduced in 1935 {{writingsystem-stub