As a Fulani, when I was growing up there weren't any official alphabet. Some people wrote in Arabic, other's in the latin letters using french phonetics and agreed upon combinations for those new sounds. (ie Bhe, dhe, etc.) I only know Fulani orally.
But around 2002, if I remember correctly, Guinean students from the University of Azhar in Egypt, started working on a new alphabet. They agreed on using latin letters for familiar sounds, since most of Fulanis speak french anyway. They added new letters for those particularly Fulani sounds.
I remember being there in a small college bedroom where they were all gathered around the computer. It had a Pentium III and they were excited about a new Pentium 4 machine that someone had donated but they didn't get the chance to install it yet. I don't remember if the two brothers were there since those names are extremely common for Fulani (yes, my name is Ibrahima too).
I was there to get a hair cut, and along the way they told me the computer had issues. All I did was go to windows Registry, and delete the files that automatically started at boot.
The script in this article is new to me, never saw it before. I read books in the one they made in Egypt, since it's easy to pick up. In fact, I think when you take an official test in Fulani, it is written in the script from Egypt.
Either way, I'm excited for this and hopefully I'll get to learn it quick enough to teach my own children.
The big point here isn't that these two brothers invented an alphabet — that alone isn't that remarkable — but that it had gained so much acceptance so quickly, and that they are still here to talk to. It sounds like writing in their language in Arabic script is still in a chaotic state where orthographic conventions have not been established, so it's the perfect time for a natively-suited alphabet to come on the scene and take over.
Yeah, I consider the arabic alphabet remarkably well adapted for the structure of Arabic but less appropriate for many of its other adapted uses (e.g. Urdu, Farsi).
But almost any alphabet could be made adequate. The politics of writing are complex.
This is great, I love languages and writing systems. My own heritage is Irish so I can see how language and culture are linked so strongly to writing the words to speak the language of that culture.
It's amazing how dismissive we can be too. A friend of mine who is Mi'kmaq (pronounced mig-maw) a First Nations/Native American was showing me ancient glyph symbols of his language. I had been telling him about languages I liked and that's why he showed me the Mi'kmaq alphabet/syllabary for their writing system. They aren't used Latin letters are used but it shows how even me as a fan of languages assumed First Nations peoples in the Americas did not develop writing systems. https://www.omniglot.com/writing/mikmaq.htm
I can spend hours looking at Omniglot.com I strongly recommend it.
"the Fulbhe people never developed a script for their language, instead using Arabic and sometimes Latin characters to write in their native tongue... Many sounds in Fulfulde can’t be represented by either alphabet".
That's not really how alphabets work. English is written in the Roman alphabet not because its sounds are particularly well suited to that alphabet, but because it's the alphabet we had.
It sounds like what Fulfulde was lacking was a standard orthography, not an alphabet of its own.
Koreans used the Chinese characters, then one of their kings decided they should use their own writing system and commissioned one. That's how the Hangul alphabet was born in 15th century
This is very similar to what happened to this African language. A people using someone else alphabet, developed their own. Old English people could have done the same for their language. They decided not to, maybe because it fit English well enough.
I also think about the Polish language. Its alphabet is based on the Latin one but letters are modified with signs that multiply the available characters and make them fit the language. Even Italian (geographically very close to Latin) has more sounds than characters and compounds multiple characters to express some sounds. Example: sc, for the English sh.
My native language is Portuguese. When I learnt the Cyrillic alphabet I realised it would be perfect to have letters for diphthongs in Portuguese. It would simplify and obviate many diacritics.
Take "simpatia" and "ânsia". In the first case, the last "ia" is not a diphthong. In the second it is and you need the diacritic over the a to make it the tonic syllable (Spanish is more clever in that the general case is that the "ia" ending is taken to be a diphthong unless you put an acute sign over the i - ía).
But, when diving further into Russian, I soon found out that they do weird things like pronouncing a G as a V (его - his).
So, my conclusion is that even if you have the perfect alphabet, it will soon become obsolete.
Well, I don't know but for the sake of argument, yes.
But how does that account for differences in accent and dialect? Some areas of the UK can be close to unintelligible for me without a few hours of acclimatisation and they are all using english!
Heavy glaswegian can be murder for me. Heavy geordie (newcastle) is a struggle. And that's even when they are using the same words (ignoring differences in vocabulary and idiom that have developed, because that isn't an alphabet issue).
Words that have the same spelling in the English alphabet but different intonations due to accents or dialects would have different spellings in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
The point of the International Phonetic Alphabet is that you can stumble across any new word you haven't heard before, and be able to pronounce it correctly. If you master the International Phonetic Alphabet and, say, stumble across a Mandarin or Russian word spelled using that alphabet, you'll be able to pronounce it.
The International Phonetic Alphabet has a unique "key" (letter) for every sound that the mouth/tongue/throat can produce basically. (Or at least it tried to, it seems extensions to the IPA have been released to account for other "qualities of speech", like tooth gnashing, lisping, sounds make with a left cleft lip and cleft palate... I'm quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... right now).
> Well, I don't know but for the sake of argument, yes.
> But how does that account for differences in accent and dialect? Some areas of the UK can be close to unintelligible for me without a few hours of acclimatisation and they are all using english!
Do you mean accent like stressing a vowel or accent like the way people sound when they speak the language?
If the latter, which alphabets allow for expressing that? I'm not familiar with any that do.
throwaway9281: Which means written english will diverge along with the pronunciation. Well, I can't say it isn't happening already...
"Breetish Prime Meenister Theresa May (picturt), unmer pressur ower her haundlin o Brexit, annoonces her intention tae resign."
"Did ye ken... (Frae a collection o Wikipaedia's airticles): ... that the hairst moose (picturt) is aboot half the weight o the hoose moose?!
"In 1642, while still a teenager, he stairted some pioneerin wark on calculatin machines. Efter three years o effort an 50 prototeeps, he biggit 20 finished machines"
Russian alphabet is pretty close to perfect. Apart from relaxed unaccented vowels and very rare exceptions one of which you mentioned if you see Russian word you have never seen before you can almost be sure you can pronounce it correctly (apart from accents, that you have to remember). There are no things like head/heat/heed.
It’s grammar, not alphabet. Weird things are dialects and simplified forms. You can still say “ego” as it’s written and that will be correct. Eventually the language grammar will allow writing “evo” (Alphabet will stay relevant)
The modern pronunciation of “g” as “v” in certain words appears not earlier than in XVII century in Moscow dialect of Russian. It eventually spread across the empire and became literary norm, but in the church and in some regions you may still hear old spelling sometimes.
Hangul isn't completely phonetic, and when learning Korean you need to learn all the transformation rules to pronounce it correctly. For example Wangshimni, a subway station in Seoul, is pronounced waŋʃimni but is spelt 왕십리, i.e. ŋoaŋ sib ri. Also, Korean has long and short vowels and that distinction isn't represented in the script.
It's also a lot younger. Hangul has ~600 years of history, which isn't that much in language terms, compared to Cyrillic which is more like 1500 years, IIRC.
But not all alphabets are equally good for a specific language, so inventing an alphabet may have its merits. Keep in mind that even among the languages using Roman alphabet there are variations, so that the english alphabet is different from the french alphabet which is different from the italian alphabet
> But not all alphabets are equally good for a specific language
why do you say that?
The relationship between a letter[0] and the sound is entirely arbitrary - I could write 'A' and pronounce it as 'T'. Why would one set of charcters be less fit than another?
[0] or symbol, more broadly eg. in welsh 'dd' and 'ff' are letters, even though 'd' and 'f' also exist in the alphabet. And in english we have sounds not represented by a single letter eg. 'th' sound
While in theory the relationship is arbitrary (in the end we just need the letter "0" and the letter "1") I think that there are practical reasons, such a conciseness (I don't want most of my sounds to use two or more letters, especially those that are used a lot), similarity between similar sounds, and similarity with other languages using the "same" alphabet (I hope nobody will every use the letter "a" to sound as a "t").
"A" is derived from the Phoenician consonant ʾālep, which is the glottal stop represented by ʾ in that transliteration of the letter's name. The Greeks reinterpreted it to mean the vowel sound instead, probably because there was no glottal stop in Greek. So on a very long timescale, it's possible that "a" will end up being pronounced as "t".
The opposite actually. A long time ago, I came up with "yoruba" as my username for various forums. (I think I was going for a vaguely Japanese look.) Some time later, I noticed "Yoruba" in the language selection sidebar of a Wikipedia article, so I decided to swap out a letter to make my username distinct.
> why would one set of charcters be less fit than another?
Because one might already have phonetics associated with it. I literally have to read out messages aloud, have my wife read aloud other parts of the message so we can figure out what the sender meant. My favorite is a Berber from Tanger: amazight, arabic, spanish, some french, no formal education but also no inhibitions to write...and all in one alphabet. The only way to understand the text is to read it aloud once for each language, mark the parts that make sense in o e of the languages and then assemble all findings...
For what it's worth, English learners are tortured by the lack of stanard orthography. Imagine the situation if English was rendered in Cyrillic half the time, with equally abysmal orthography.
You want to fix this situation. Do you keep one alphabet or both, and impose new phonetics; or do you avoid the hodge-podge and propose a new alphabet. I can appreciate the clean design.
IPA is useful for expressing phonetics, but the phonetics for a given word in English shift over time and space. Written language is useful for expression that is durable in time and space.
If you read English texts from the wrong side of the pond, there's some spelling divergence, and if you read old enough texts, there's more. And of course we have new words, and new uses of old words, such as literally which now means figuratively.
But if you read old books of rhymes, you can see that spoken English has diverged a lot more -- many clever rhymes of the past no longer sound rhyming.
Absolutely not. Slavish adherence to phonetics means you need to standardize a dialect for your orthography, include extraneous changes (like shifts in vowels caused by adjacent words) and isn't done by any writing system I know of.
German is a good example. The pronunciation of Standard German is different in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. If we wrote German in IPA, it would be different in all three countries. Even within Germany, somebody from Munich would either write something very different from somebody in Berlin, or they would have to imagine how a Hannoverian would pronounce the word, in order to write the standard spelling. Because German orthography is standardized and is not a phonetic alphabet, people in Switzerland can say /r/ and people in the Rhineland can say /ʁ/ but they both write <r> and thus spell words the same way.
Look at the Vietnamese alphabet, which is basically hacked together from Portuguese, colonialism, a massive amount of diacritics and bits of French. The most common surname in Vietnam, for example, is Nguyễn, with both a circumflex and a tilde on the e. One alphabet isn't always the best at expressing a particular language.
We share the same kind of story in Lebanon. Three friends created not only the alphabet but automated the conjugation using ai. Check the verb conjugation on
So what's the actual benefit of this? Maybe there's something I'm missing but couldn't they just use any alphabet that has enough symbols to represent the sounds in their language? What's actually gained from this?
They had two alphabets which were familiar to them but didn’t fit and should be adjusted, probably repurposing some letters for different sounds. Any other alphabet was completely foreign to their culture, would probably require some adjustments too and thus would not bring any benefits besides some existing fonts. As languages would evolve, it would create an incompatible fork anyway. Own alphabet brings 100% compatibility, cultural heritage and reduced cognitive load when learning new languages (ask English speakers how they figure out how Z, S or V should be pronounced in German).
Again, this could just as well have been achieved by just adapting a different alphabet, so this is not really a benefit to inventing your own alphabet
>cultural heritage
That depends on what you take "cultural heritage" to mean. I don't think inventing something new from scratch actually brings any kind of heritage. It looks like a case of "we just need to have something unique because, uhh, reasons".
>reduced cognitive load when learning new languages
I'm not convinced this is true. You're trading not having to switch mindsets about the sounds when switching languages against not having general familiarity with the alphabet, and I'm not sure which has a bigger impact on cognitive load. I also don't think either of those really has a big impact; the fact that a different language just has different sounds seems to be the main cause of cognitive load here.
All in all I think these are some pretty myopic benefits at best, and do not justify the gradeoff of having to add yet more stuff to unicode, make fonts for this new language, etcetera. I do not think the world needs yet another format to write down sounds.
They developed it as teenagers and had probably never heard of the IPA at that point in their lives.
An IPA encoding may not have spread as well as a unique alphabet designed by two members of the culture it was intended to work with, either. IPA is an ugly mishmash of Latin and Greek characters with assorted flourishes; the further you get from English and various Romance languages, the more you have to use the fiddly mismatched characters; ADLaM is clearly one set of characters designed to harmonize with each other.
I hesitate to wade into this, since I have a lot of admiration for these two men, and I am only a mediocre speaker of Pulaar, the western dialect spoken by Fulani, whose eastern dialect is Fulfulde. I have seen several variations of this story making the rounds over the last few years, and it is full of misconceptions about the Fulani communities across the Sahel, and more generally about linguistics (and language politics) of trans-national communities. It is unfortunate that in this particular article Microsoft repeats many of the errors of the Atlantic[1], and the Letterform Archive [2], and adds its own self-congratulatory spin to it.
The first misconception is that Pulaar/Fulfulde is/was rarely written. Despite the experiences of the Barry brothers, the language has been written for hundreds of years. There are manuscripts in Arabic script that attest to this - unfortunately these are generally poorly catalogued, but BU's African Ajami Library lists 25 [3] and the British Library has several collections [4]. There is a strong historical argument that the Fulani were actually the primary instigators of literacy in pre-colonial West Africa, from the 15th and 16th centuries. The practice of writing Pulaar/Fulfulde with Arabic script did without question wane in the 20th c. - particularly among the more educated and urban communities which the Barry brothers come from. This led to decreased standardisation of the language as written in the Arabic script, especially as Fulani communities came to have stronger ties to national identities than to their transnational identity as Fulani. At the same time, the general push for literacy in languages written with Latin script in the region (mostly French and English) led to a loss in language prestige for Pulaar/Fulfulde as it had less utility as a lingua franca, and was not the language of religion, trade or politics, in the way it had been.
By the 1990's, however there was substantial linguistic work done on Pulaar/Fulfulde and a modified Latin alphabet was widely in use in the linguistic and academic community, which is currently seen on almost all Wikipedia articles on the subject. This is marked by 'hooked' letters for plosives, as in Fulɓe, which this Microsoft article writes "Fulbhe." The fact that this was not widely enough known that the Barry brothers came across it before developing a new standard for writing is testament to the fragmentation within the Fulani community, but I think it also reflects the fact that they did not come at the issue from a linguistics background. Nonetheless, this pre-existing writing standard does accurately represent all of the sounds in Pulaar/Fulfulde (and also is not much different from many other African languages in the region written with a Latin alphabet). It also was used for printing a number of books in the early 2000s, and I knew of a handful of companies regularly printing books in Pulaar in Dakar, Senegal (where it is also a minority language). I once picked up an order for 10,000 books printed in Pulaar in 2005, typeset in this commonly accepted script adapted from the Latin Alphabet.
The second major misconception of the article, is that a language needs to have its own script to be accurately represented, or that having its own script enhances the literacy rate of a language. Other comments have touched on this, so I won't dwell, but from a linguistic perspective (or even from a software language perspective) the opposite is more likely to be the case. The answer to the proliferation of different standards should almost never be to create a new standard - especially one that is not at all based on the previous standards (as Adlam is based on neither Arabic or Latin abjads/alphabets). Literacy in Pulaar/Fulfulde is almost certainly better served by doubling down on an existing standard that is accessible to those who most want to access it, rather than a new standard. There are 100-150 million Pulaar/Fulfulde speakers, so even success in the range of thousands of Fulani who recognise Adlam doesn't mean it is likely to overtake the actual pragmatic literacy of those hundreds of millions who already ready on a daily basis in Latin scripts, and could easily recognise the adapted letters.
From a political perspective, there might be a value in a new unifying standard that underscores the uniqueness of Fulɓe from their neighbours in Mauritania to Sudan. But in every one of those countries, the Fulɓe are a minority, and many of their communities are nomadic/transhumant as well, further undermining their ability to integrate or oppose existing political structures. While I applaud Adlam as a commendable assertion of identity, and a valuable potential contribution to the linguistics and typography of West African languages (should it engage constructively with the field), it is politically doomed, and unfortunately lends credence to the dictum that "a language is a dialect with an army."
Pulaar/Fulfulde is an incredibly important language, but it hasn't had an army since the fall of the Empire of Sokoto in 1903 to colonial powers. It has largely been seen as a dialect because of that, despite being one of the most widely spoken in Africa (Swahili is the only other African language with a claim to have more than 100 million native speakers).
But around 2002, if I remember correctly, Guinean students from the University of Azhar in Egypt, started working on a new alphabet. They agreed on using latin letters for familiar sounds, since most of Fulanis speak french anyway. They added new letters for those particularly Fulani sounds.
I remember being there in a small college bedroom where they were all gathered around the computer. It had a Pentium III and they were excited about a new Pentium 4 machine that someone had donated but they didn't get the chance to install it yet. I don't remember if the two brothers were there since those names are extremely common for Fulani (yes, my name is Ibrahima too).
I was there to get a hair cut, and along the way they told me the computer had issues. All I did was go to windows Registry, and delete the files that automatically started at boot.
The script in this article is new to me, never saw it before. I read books in the one they made in Egypt, since it's easy to pick up. In fact, I think when you take an official test in Fulani, it is written in the script from Egypt.
Either way, I'm excited for this and hopefully I'll get to learn it quick enough to teach my own children.