West Africa has been busy lately. Busy inventing
writing. Since the 1800s, this area has become home to dozens of brand new scripts. One paper
I'm reading counts at least twenty-six. Can most of us even name that many scripts from
outside Africa!? What is happening here? Why so many? Today let's get curious about West
Africa and this new chapter they're adding to the history of writing. The south of Guinea. Two young brothers have
locked themselves in their room to complete an unusual task: closing their eyes and drawing
lines. At the ages of ten and fourteen, together they're deciding on shapes of signs, envisioning
how a people's writing system will work at the very start of an entire script's history. This history isn't ancient. It's not that
old at all. The brothers are Abdoulaye and Ibrahima, and the year is 1986. Back then,
if you were from among their Fula people and wanted to pass a message to a relative, you'd
get a letter transcribed in Ajami, basically Arabic adapted to kind of fit your language.
You'd bring it to a taxi or anyone heading towards the destination, and hopefully find
someone skilled in guessing your native words that the Ajami script represented. Someone
like Ibrahim's and Abdoulaye's dad, who is very good at this Ajami letter guessing game. The
brothers follow in his footsteps, get good at it, too. But they want more. They want
a script meant for their language and their people. They invent a script that has come to be known
as Adlam. It's spreading quickly throughout their community of traditionally nomadic people
living across many countries, including among women who didn't attend school in English
or French. Today, Fula people teach classes in Adlam, write letters and books in Adlam
and post and text in Adlam on their phones. The brothers would hardly be the first or
the last to create a brand new script for one of West Africa's tongues. Decades before Adlam, in the 1940s, prolific
author and language scholar Sulemana Kantɛ is vexed by how a Lebanese journalist dismisses
his native language: unlike colonial literate cultures, Africa's Indigenous voices are as
impossible to capture in writing as birds chirping. Instead of taking this as a decisive
putdown, these words strike Kantɛ as a challenge. He unveils a new standard for Manding languages,
embracing many dialects at once by naming the script with a word they all share: N'ko, "I say".
N'ko goes on to become one of Africa's most successful scripts. Adlam and N'ko both have characteristics that
may remind you of Arabic: written right to left, often or always in a cursive connected
style. They also have things reminiscent of Latin script: full vowel letters. And numbers
that run in the same direction as the text. (Arabic!!) But the symbols, and the features,
are their own. Of course, we could walk down this list of
well over twenty other West African scripts, with a story behind each one: Ndebe, Garay,
Bété, Yoruba Holy Writing, Shü-mom, and back two centuries to the 1800s and the Vai
syllabary. In a broader African context, this list of
scripts is not alone either. Over the same time period, far to the east Beria have adopted and
popularized camel brand writing. Old southern African symbology gets crafted into a new Bantu
writing system. And there are multiple home-grown Somali scripts. But the sheer number makes
West Africa a writing systems hotbed. Why invent so many scripts though? Where does this
come from? At face value, these scripts solve a technical
linguistic problem: Ajami doesn't represent Maninka or Fula well, or Latin doesn't represent
Igbo or Vai. Consider this need, this challenge in its place,
in the context of where we are. West Africa is an area full of unique features you'd have
to account for when creating a writing system, including features that are rare elsewhere. Here are two different Fula words. Yes, different!
In the first word, the nasal n and the d fall in two separate syllables: hin-du. Ok. But
the second requires a bit of explanation. So, West Africa has prenasalized consonants.
You start a stop sound in your nose — m, n, ŋ — and then immediately raise your
soft palate to release it through your mouth – b, d, g – all in a single unit: mbe, ngo,
and... ndu. That's why the second word is a different word, also two syllables. It's
hin-du vs hi-ndu. Well, Adlam has a symbol for that! Two more words for you. What's the difference here?
Like many languages you've met before if you've been listening to my stories over the years,
Fula varieties distinguish short and long vowels. So there's a continuum of Fula languages.
One of them is known as Pular with a short a, and another one is called Pulaar with long
a. Adlam has a symbol to represent that, too! What just may be the rarest of West Africa's
sounds are these kind of two sounds in one. Brace your articulators! Put your tongue in
position to say a g and your lips in position to say a b. Try to release both of them at
the same time: ɡ͡b. And without voicing: k͡p. Or nasal: ŋ͡m. So instead of calling
this language Ig-bo, try saying I-ɡ͡bo. (And here's an extra credit challenge from Vai: what
happens if you prenasalize this sound?) Wow, you're getting a phonetic workout today. These
sounds are so common in the area's names and words that Adlam has symbols dedicated to
them. A triangle pointing downwards is the N'ko
letter for this double sound. But N'ko also supports some West African features missing
from Adlam. So N'ko has seven vowel letters for the seven vowels of Manding languages.
And, as usual in this part of Africa, Manding vowels are tonal. In fact, south of the Sahara,
most languages care about tone. Wolof and Fula are exceptional for not doing this. And
that's why Kantɛ gave N'ko seven tone marks, combining short and long pronunciation of
vowels with tones that are falling or rising or low or high. (...Hmm.) One last West African feature: nasal vowels.
This area is very into nasalization, with languages that distinguish regular versus
nasal vowels in short and long flavors, or even spreading nasalization across nearby
vowels in a way that'd make you think you were hearing Guaraní. And N'ko handles this.
It equips nasal vowels with a simple dot below. So all combined, N'ko has a compact way to represent
nasalization, length and tone for the vowels of Manding languages. And the Vai script has symbols for all of
these except tone. Just as rows of Vai signs represent what you might consider "normal"
consonant-vowel syllables, so too are there rows of signs for prenasalized and for doubly
articulated sounds. Not specially marked. Not treated as unique cases. Each is just
another sign fit for a language where they are natively effortless, everyday sounds. That's not the whole story though. Each of
these scripts isn't just a linguistic exercise. That's actually not the main reason why they
exist. There's more context here. The context of a less-told history where West Africa has
long used visual graphic codes. Ancient Nsibidi symbols, still the inspiration behind multiple
of these modern scripts. The Adinkra signs in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Or the countless famed
multilingual medieval manuscripts of Timbuktu. All of this before colonization. Rupture. These many scripts are about people finding
an Indigenous West African vision of the written word. Often a literal vision. We're told the
inspiration for the Vai script and for Mandombe came in a dream. For N'ko, it was almost a
dare to show off that West African languages are literary and writable. And ADLaM, its
very name has become an acrophonic definition for the script's grassroots community: the
letters that protect the people from vanishing. At the start, I recounted how two young brothers
stood at the root of an entire script's history. Well, most of that history looks yet to be
written. Thank you for watching. And to my patrons
for supporting me and being so encouraging while I learned and animated. Ah, this the
part where I say: stick around and subscribe for language.
