The Alphabet That Will Save a People From Disappearing
As kids, two Guinean brothers invented a new script for their native language. Now they’re trying to get it on every smartphone.
Twenty-six years ago, two brothers decided their native language needed a new alphabet. The scripts they’d been using to read and write their native Fulani, an African language spoken by at least 40 million people, weren’t working well.
Fulani’s sounds were rendered imprecisely by the Arabic alphabet, the script most often used to write it; the Latin alphabet presented similar problems. Neither the Arabic nor the Latin alphabets could accurately spell Fulani words that require producing a “b” or a “d” sound while gulping in air, for example, so Fulani speakers had modified both alphabets with new symbols—often in inconsistent ways.
“Why do Fulani people not have their own writing system?” Abdoulaye Barry remembers asking his father one day in elementary school. The variety of writing styles made it difficult for families and friends who lived in different countries to communicate easily. Abdoulaye’s father, who learned Arabic in Koranic schools, often helped friends and family in Nzérékoré—Guinea’s second-largest city—decipher letters they received, reading aloud the idiosyncratically modified Arabic scripts. As they grew older, Abdoulaye and his brother Ibrahima began to translate letters, too.
“Those letters were very difficult to read even if you were educated in Arabic,” Abdoulaye said. “You could hardly make out what was written.”
So, in 1990, the brothers started coming up with an alternative. Abdoulaye was 10 years old; Ibrahima was 14.
After school, they’d shut themselves in their rooms to draw, filling blank composition books they brought home from the classroom with the shapes that would make up their new alphabet. They’d take turns drawing letters, and together, assigned sounds to the shapes they came up with.
Six months later, they had a working script. Like Arabic, its 28 letters were written right to left. But unlike Arabic, whose
short vowels are written as diacritical marks above and below letters, the script assigned its five vowels proper letters. It looked something like a cursive version of
Ethiopic. Ibrahima and Abdoulaye’s parents started taking their project seriously, and invited one of their father’s relatives, who had an influential post in the local government, for a demonstration.
The visitor tested them: With Abdoulaye in the other room, Ibrahima would take dictation. When Abdoulaye returned, he read aloud what his brother had written. They switched and repeated the test. Over and over, the brothers consistently read out the right sounds, even those unique to Fulani. Crucially, they spelled the same complicated words in the same ways, independently of one another.
The visitor turned to their father. “Oh, yes, these kids are being serious,” he said.
It’s not every day that a new alphabet is born. The scripts in widest use today—Latin, Chinese, Arabic, Devanagari, Cyrillic—are all at least a thousand years old, and they each evolved from earlier alphabets. Creating a new script and getting it adopted widely is an enormous challenge.
The Cherokee alphabet is a notable success story. In the early 19th century, a man named Sequoyah created a script for writing his native Cherokee, which until then had only ever been spoken aloud. At first, many thought his scribbles were meaningless, and that he was playing tricks on people. But in a blind test not unlike the one Abdoulaye and Ibrahima would complete more than a century and a half later, Sequoyah and his daughter, who had also learned the alphabet, proved that the symbols they’d drawn actually represented words by reading what the other had written.
Sequoyah began to teach others to read and write, and his simple alphabet spread quickly among tribe members. In 1828, just seven years after Sequoyah invented the alphabet, the first-ever Cherokee-language printing press was used to publish the
Cherokee Phoenix, a newspaper that was distributed for free to Cherokee speakers who didn’t know English. The press helped standardize and simplify the script, and made it possible to quickly publish newspapers and books.
Today, the computer-age equivalent of casting metal type in the shape of a new alphabet is encoding an alphabet in the worldwide typography standard known as Unicode. The
Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization, develops standards for the way letters and numbers appear on computer screens. Since 1991, a group of technology companies have worked together to develop a universal character set—a system of coding letters, numbers, and symbols that allows computers to render any supported language in the world.
Cherokee was added to the Unicode standard in 1999, but it wasn’t until 2003 that Apple created a Cherokee keyboard for Mac computers. The first Cherokee keyboard arrived on Windows several years later. Today, Cherokee keyboards exist on iPhones and Android devices, and Facebook, Gmail, and Google Search all support the language.
The Cherokee Nation has put a particular emphasis on language development: The language program has 13 full-time employees, many of whom worked with Google for two years to implement Android support for the alphabet. Even so, its progress toward digital inclusion has been slow.
“A script is not a biological entity,” said Kamal Mansour, a specialist in non-Latin typography at Monotype who represents the company on the Unicode Consortium. “It doesn’t live alone. It has to have acceptance from people.”
“In Africa, there’s been a spate of inventions from very clever people,” he continued. “But many don’t gain acceptance, and they just die off.”
The Barry brothers had a long path ahead of them.
During the decade after that first big test in the brothers’ house, their new alphabet—yet unnamed—spread at an astounding rate. Eventually, it would come to be called Adlam, after its first four letters: the equivalents of a, d, l, and m. The word is also an acronym for a phrase that translates to “the alphabet that will save a people from disappearing.”
They started by teaching their friends and family, asking each student to teach three others. They transcribed school books—algebra, geometry, history—using their script, copying them into the very same blank composition books that were home to their first sketches.
In junior high school, they started visiting neighborhoods and markets to teach larger groups of people. Their big break came in 1993, when Abdoulaye—still a high schooler—traveled to Conakry, Guinea’s capital city, during summer vacation. There, he tracked down a famous radio personality and got himself invited onto his show, where he demonstrated the script live on air, as the host described what he saw. “That’s how the whole country learned about Adlam,” Abdoulaye says.
A document lays out the stroke order for writing each capital letter in Adlam (Courtesy of Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry)
By the mid-1990s, the brothers could walk into a market in a new part of Guinea and see people they’d never met reading and writing their alphabet. Many Fula people are nomadic farmers or traders, and the brothers credit their transitory nature with the writing system’s quick propagation.
