
Two brothers invented an alphabet for their native language, Fulfulde - curtis
https://news.microsoft.com/stories/people/adlam.html?ocid=lock
======
ibudiallo
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.

------
JasonFruit
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.

~~~
sanxiyn
The primary problem with Arabic script is that it is an abjad, not an
alphabet. It is less suitable for writing a vowel rich language like Fula.

~~~
gumby
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.

------
dghughes
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](https://www.omniglot.com/writing/mikmaq.htm)

I can spend hours looking at Omniglot.com I strongly recommend it.

------
gumby
The article doesn't really show the alphabet (their picture has the stroke
marks overdrawn so it's hard to see). Here's the unicode page with images of
all the characters: [http://www.unicode.org/errata/Adlam-Ebima-
chart-2019-05.pdf](http://www.unicode.org/errata/Adlam-Ebima-
chart-2019-05.pdf)

------
chiph
These guys are the modern-day Sequoyah, who invented the writing system for
the Cherokee language in the early 1800's

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary)

------
dmurray
"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.

~~~
forinti
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.

~~~
ivan_gammel
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)

~~~
mynegation
No, it will not be correct, but of course you will be understood, no problem.
I had a friend that pronounced these words with г for ironical purposes.

~~~
ivan_gammel
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.

------
PortableCode
The alphabet itself and a sample text on Omniglot:
[https://omniglot.com/writing/adlam.htm](https://omniglot.com/writing/adlam.htm)

------
abcleb
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

[http://www.lebaneselanguage.org](http://www.lebaneselanguage.org)

[http://www.lebaneselanguage.org/language/lebanese-verbs-
conj...](http://www.lebaneselanguage.org/language/lebanese-verbs-conjugation/)

------
Smithalicious
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?

~~~
ivan_gammel
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).

~~~
Smithalicious
>100% compatibility

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.

------
JoeAltmaier
Why not use the phonetic alphabet? Was it not known yet?

~~~
egypturnash
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.

------
jdmitch
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).

[1]
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-a...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-
alphabet-that-will-save-a-people-from-disappearing/506987/) [2]
[https://letterformarchive.org/events/inventing-the-adlam-
scr...](https://letterformarchive.org/events/inventing-the-adlam-script-
designing-type-for-a-society-in-flux) [3]
[https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/18688](https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/18688)
[4]
[https://eap.bl.uk/collection/EAP387-1](https://eap.bl.uk/collection/EAP387-1)

