Writing systems of Africa

The writing systems of Africa are the current and historical writing systems used on the African continent, both those which are indigenous and those which were introduced. In many African societies, history was traditionally recorded orally despite most societies having developed a writing script, leading to them being termed "oral cultures" in contrast to "literate cultures". However, this generalization misses the significant pre-modern use of written languages in various African cultures and the widespread modern adoption of written language on the continent.
Today, the Latin script is commonly encountered across much of Africa, especially in the regions of Western Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa. The Arabic script is mainly used in North Africa. Among the indigenous writing systems, the Ge'ez script is widely used in the Horn of Africa, and the Tifinagh script is used in many parts of the Sahel region. Variations of the Arabic-derived Ajami script are also notably used in various regions of Subsaharan Africa.
There are also various notable indigenous African writing systems which are no longer in common use today, the most famous being Egyptian hieroglyphs. A significant number of less common writing systems are also of significant local, regional, or historical importance, many of which are described below.
While historic writing systems from North Africa are among the oldest in the world, native writing systems and scripts are less common in the cultures of Subsaharan Africa. However, this is not to say that there are not indigenous pre-modern writing systems in the region; the Tifinagh script has been used by the Tuareg people since antiquity, as has the Geʽez script and its derivatives in the Horn of Africa. Other groups have encountered the Latin and Arabic scripts for centuries, but rarely adopted them in a widespread manner until the 19th century as they simply did not find them necessary for their own societies (Ajamiyya writing being a notable exception).
Perhaps the most famous African writing system is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. These developed later into forms known as Hieratic, Demotic and, through Phoenician and Greek, Coptic. The Coptic language is still used today as the liturgical language in the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the Coptic Catholic Church of Alexandria. As mentioned above, the Bohairic dialect of Coptic is used currently in the Coptic Orthodox Church. Other dialects include Sahidic, Akhmimic, Lycopolitan, Fayyumic, and Oxyrhynchite.
The Meroitic language and its writing system was used in Meroë and the wider Kingdom of Kush (in modern day Sudan) during the Meroitic period. It was used from 300 BCE to 400 CE.
The Tifinagh alphabet is still actively used to varying degrees in trade and modernized forms for writing of Berber languages (Tamazight, Tamashek, etc.) of the Maghreb, Sahara, and Sahel regions (Savage 2008).
Neo-Tifinagh is encoded in the Unicode range U+2D30 to U+2D7F, starting from version 4.1.0. There are 55 defined characters, but there are more characters being used than those defined. In ISO 15924, the code Tfng is assigned to Neo-Tifinagh.
The Geʽez script is an abugida that was created in Horn of Africa in the 8th-9th century BC for writing the Geʽez language. The script is used today in Ethiopia and Eritrea for Amharic, Tigrinya, and several other languages. It is sometimes called Ethiopic, and is known in Eritrea and Ethiopia as the fidel or abugida.
Geʽez or Ethiopic has been computerized and assigned Unicode 3.0 codepoints between U+1200 and U+137F (decimal 4608–4991), containing the basic syllable signs for Geʽez, Amharic, and Tigrinya, punctuation and numerals.
Nsibidi (also known as "nsibiri", "nchibiddi", and "nchibiddy") is a system of symbols indigenous to what is now southeastern Nigeria that is apparently an ideographic script, though there have been suggestions that it includes logographic elements. The symbols are at least several centuries old: early forms appeared on excavated pottery as well as what are most likely ceramic stools and headrests from the Calabar region, with a range of dates from 400 (and possibly earlier, 2000 BC) to 1400 CE.
Adinkra is a set of symbols developed by the Akan, used to represent concepts and aphorisms. Oral tradition attributes the origin of adinkra to Gyaman in modern-day Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, they were one of the means for "supporting the transmission of a complex and nuanced body of practice and belief".
Adinkra iconography has been adapted into several segmental scripts, including
Lusona is a system of ideograms that functioned as mnemonic devices to record proverbs, fables, games, riddles and animals, and to transmit knowledge. They originate in what is now eastern Angola, northwestern Zambia and adjacent areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
There are various other writing systems native to West Africa and Central Africa. In the last two centuries, a large variety of writing systems have been created in Africa (Dalby 1967, 1968, 1969). Some are still in use today, while others have been largely displaced by non-African writing such as the Arabic script and the Latin script. Below are non-Latin and non-Arabic-based writing systems used to write various languages of Africa:
Tifinagh (Tuareg Berber language: ⵜⴼⵏⵗ; Neo-Tifinagh: ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ; Berber Latin alphabet: Tifinaɣ; Berber pronunciation: [tifinaɣ]) is a script used to write the Berber languages. Tifinagh is descended from the ancient Libyco-Berber alphabet. The traditional Tifinagh, sometimes called Tuareg Tifinagh, is still favored by the Tuareg Berbers of the Sahara desert in southern Algeria, northeastern Mali, northern Niger and northern Burkina Faso for use writing the Tuareg Berber language. Neo-Tifinagh is an alphabet developed by Berber Academy to adopt Tuareg Tifinagh for use with Kabyle; it has been since modified for use across North Africa.
Most written scripts, including Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, were based on previous written scripts and the origin of the history of the alphabet is ultimately Egyptian Hieroglyphs, through Proto-Sinaitic or Old Canaanite. Many other indigenous African scripts were similarly developed from previous scripts.
The Phoenicians from what is now Lebanon traded with North Africans and founded cities there, the most famous being Carthage. The Phoenician alphabet is thought to be the origin of many others, including: Arabic, Greek, and Latin. The Carthaginian dialect is called Punic. Today's Tifinagh is thought by some scholars to be descended from Punic, but this is still under debate.
Additionally, the Proto-Sinaitic Wadi el-Hol inscriptions indicate the presence of an extremely early form of the script in central Egypt (near the modern city of Qena) in the early 2nd millennium BC.
The Greek alphabet was adapted in Egypt to the Coptic alphabet (with the addition of 7 letters derived from ancient Demotic) in order to write the language (which is today only a liturgical language of the Coptic Church). An uncial variant of the Coptic alphabet was used from the 8th to the 15th century for writing Old Nubian, an ancient variety of the Nubian language.
The Arabic script was introduced into Africa by the spread of Islam and by trade. Apart from its obvious use for the Arabic language, it has been adapted for a number of other languages over the centuries. The Arabic script is still used in some of these cases, but not in others.
It was often necessary to modify the script to accommodate sounds not represented in the script as used for the Arabic language. The adapted form of the script is also called Ajami, especially in the Sahel, and sometimes by specific names for individual languages, such as Wolofal, Sorabe, and Wadaad's writing. Despite the existence of a widely known and well-established script in Ethiopia and Eritrea there are a few cases where Muslims in Ethiopia and Eritrea have used the Arabic script, instead, for reasons of religious identity.
There are no official standard forms or orthographies, though local usage follows traditional practice for the area or language. There was an effort by ISESCO to standardize Ajami usage. Some critics believe this relied too much on Perso-Arabic script forms and not enough on existing use in Africa. In any event, the effect of that standardization effort has been limited.
Though the Latin Script was used to write Latin throughout Roman Africa and a handful of Latin-script inscriptions in the Punic language (more commonly written in the Phoenician script, as noted above) also survive, the first systematic attempts to adapt it to African languages were probably those of Christian missionaries on the eve of European colonization (Pasch 2008). These, however, were isolated, done by people without linguistic training, and sometimes resulted in competing systems for the same or similar languages.
One of the challenges in adapting the Latin script to many African languages was the use in those tongues of sounds unfamiliar to Europeans and thus without writing convention they could resort to. Various use was made of letter combinations, modifications, and diacritics to represent such sounds. Some resulting orthographies, such as the Yoruba writing system established by the late 19th century, have remained largely intact.
In many cases, the colonial regimes had little interest in the writing of African languages, but in others they did. In the case of Hausa in Northern Nigeria, for instance, the colonial government was directly involved in determining the written forms for the language.
Since the colonial period, there have been efforts to propose and promulgate standardized or at least harmonized approaches to using the Latin script for African languages. Examples include the Lepsius Standard Alphabet (mid-19th century) and the Africa Alphabet of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (1928, 1930).
Following independence there has been continued attention to the transcription of African languages. In the 1960s and 1970s, UNESCO facilitated several "expert meetings" on the subject, including a seminal meeting in Bamako in 1966, and one in Niamey in 1978. The latter produced the African Reference Alphabet. Various country-level standardizations have also been made or proposed, such as the Pan-Nigerian alphabet. A Berber Latin alphabet for northern Berber includes extended Latin characters and two Greek letters.
Such discussions continue, especially on more local scales regarding cross-border languages.
There has been a Jewish presence in North Africa for millennia, with communities speaking a variety of different languages. Though some of these are written with the Arabic script (as is the case with Judeo-Tunisian Arabic) or with Ge'ez (as with Kayla and Qwara), many- including Haketia and several forms of Judeo-Arabic- have made frequent or exclusive use of the Hebrew alphabet.
Braille, a tactile script widely used by the visually impaired, has been adapted to write several African languages- including those of Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia.
There is not much information on the adaptation of typewriters to African language needs (apart from Arabic, and the African languages that do not use any modified Latin letters). There were apparently some typewriters fitted with keys for typing Nigerian languages. There was at least one IBM Selectric typewriter "typeball" developed for some African languages (including Fula).
Around 1930, the English typewriter was modified by Ayana Birru of Ethiopia to type an incomplete and ligated version of the Amharic alphabet. Typewriters for the Geez script, used in Ethiopia and Eritrea, were mass produced by Olivetti starting in the 1950s.
The 1982 proposal for a unicase version of the African Reference Alphabet made by Michael Mann and David Dalby included a suggested typewriter adaptation.
With early desktop computers it was possible to modify existing 8-bit Latin fonts to accommodate specialized character needs. This was done without any kind of system or standardization, meaning incompatibility of encodings.
Similarly, there were diverse efforts (successful, but not standardized) to enable use of Ethiopic-Eritrean /Ge'ez on computers. The earliest computer output of the Fidel was developed for a nine-pin dot matrix printer in 1983, by a team that included people from the Bible Society of Ethiopia, churches, and missions. The first item published with this system was a Christian song book, እንዘምር.
There was never any ISO 8859 standard for any native African languages. One standard – ISO 6438 for bibliographic purposes – was adopted but apparently little used (curiously, although this was adopted at about the same time as the African Reference Alphabet, there were some differences between the two, indicating perhaps a lack of communication between efforts to harmonize transcription of African languages and the ISO standards process).
Unicode in principle resolves the issue of incompatible encoding, but other questions such as the handling of diacritics in extended Latin scripts are still being raised. These in turn relate to fundamental decisions regarding orthographies of African languages.
A number of contemporary and historic African scripts including Adlam, Bamum, Bassa Vah, Coptic, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Garay, Ge'ez, Medefaidrin, Mende Ki-ka-ku, Meroitic, N'Ko, Osmanya, Tifinagh, and Vai are currently included in the Unicode standard, as are individual characters to other ranges of languages used, such as Latin and Arabic. Efforts to encode African scripts, including minority scripts and major historical writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphs, are being coordinated by the Script Encoding Initiative.