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 several widely used constructed writing systems in wide use today in West Africa, with the most frequently used being the Vai syllabary and the N'Ko script.
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.

Indigenous writing and symbolic systems

Ancient African orthographies

Ancient Egyptian

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 Bohairic dialect of 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. Other dialects of Coptic include Sahidic, Akhmimic, Lycopolitan, Fayyumic, and Oxyrhynchite.

Ancient Meroitic

The Meroitic language and its writing system was used in Meroë and the wider Kingdom of Kush during the Meroitic period. The Kingdom of Kush previously used the Egyptian writing system since 2000 BC. The meroitic script was used from 450 BC to 400 AD.File:Moroccan stop sign in Arabic and Berber.jpg|thumb|200px|right|Bilingual and biscriptal "Stop" sign in Tifinagh.

Tifinagh

The Tifinagh alphabet is still actively used to varying degrees in trade and modernized forms for writing of Berber languages of the Maghreb, Sahara, and Sahel regions.
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.

Ge'ez

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, containing the basic syllable signs for Geʽez, Amharic, and Tigrinya, punctuation and numerals.

Symbols

Nsibidi

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 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
  • The Adinkra Alphabet, invented by Charles Korankye in 2015, and expanded and refined over the next several years to accommodate various languages spoken in Ghana and Ivory Coast such as Akan, Dagbani, Ewe and Ga- a process that culminated with the creation of a standardized font in 2020.
  • Adinkra Nkyea, a writing system based on the Adinkra symbols.. Some Ghanaians use the Adinkra Nkyea writing system for the Akan Language and its dialects. A Majority of Adinkra Nkyea is derived from the original Adinkra Symbols. Adinkra Nkyea contains some 39 characters, ten numerals, and three punctuation marks.

    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.

Modern orthographies

East Africa

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. 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: