Adlam

The Adlam alphabet is designed to write Fula. This language is spoken in the northwest of Africa. It originally belonged to the nomadic Fulani tribe. Nowadays it is spoken by 40 million people from Senegal to Egypt.

Traditionally, the Fula language is written in Latin or Arabic. However, in the late 80s of the last century, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry developed their own Adlam script for Fula. Over the years the alphabet has spread and is now taught at schools in Guinea, Nigeria, Liberia and other neighboring countries. It is supported on Google's Android and Chrome operating systems.

The alphabet is named after the first four letters: A, D, L, M. The words of the phrase ‘Alkule DandayɗE Leñol Mulugol‘ begin with these letters, which is translated as ‘the alphabet that protects peoples from extinction‘.

Adlam is a consonant-vocal alphabet. The direction of writing is from right to left. The letters can be written separately or connected using italics, just like in Arabic or Nko. The script has its own diacritics and original characters of decimal digits. At the same time, it uses European punctuation, except for the question mark ؟ , which was taken from Arabic.