Following independence, the government of Guinea adopted rules of transcription for the

languages of Guinea The Republic of Guinea is a multilingual country, with over 40 languages spoken. The official language is French, which was inherited from colonial rule. Several indigenous languages have been given the status of national languages: Fula (or Pul ...

based on the characters and diacritic combinations available on typewriters of that period. This alphabet was used officially until 1989.

Guinea language orthography

The Guinea alphabet made use of several digraphs (including either "h" or "y" as the second letter), some of which represent consonants not present in European languages, and two

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 ( grave accent and diaeresis) for open vowels. This system was widely used within the country but differed from the orthographies of neighboring countries of

West Africa West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, M ...

, as developed in the wake of the 1966 Bamako expert meeting on harmonizing orthographies of the cross-border languages of the region. In 1989, following a meeting on reform of the alphabet in 1988, it was decided to adopt an orthography similar to the

African reference alphabet An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended the use of single letters for a sound (that is, a phoneme) ...

used elsewhere in the region.Effectuated by decree 019/PRG/SGG/89 A summary table of the digraphs and diacritics of the old alphabet, and their extended Latin equivalents in the new system, follows: :

References

* Latin alphabets Writing systems of Africa Multilingual orthographies 1989 disestablishments in Africa {{Latin-script-stub