Medefaidrin

Medefaidrin is the language and script of the Christian community in Nigeria. In Russian literature it also appears by the name Oberi-Okaime.

Both language and script appeared simultaneously around 1931. Rumour has it that a holy spirit turned up in front of one of the founders and taught him the language. And the writing came to his disciple in a dream. This secret knowledge was used in praying and they tried to teach it at school. The colonial authorities did not like the latter and the practice was cancelled. Nowadays the script is no longer used, and only a few old manuscripts have survived.

The structure of the Medefaidrin language resembles the local colloquial ibibio. And the alphabet was probably created under the Latin influence. It is constant-vocal. The direction of writing is from left to right. The script includes 32 letters, while the outlines of the uppercase differ significantly from the lowercase. Therefore, they are encoded as separate characters in Unicode.

You may encounter four punctuation marks in the script. Two of them are used as European dot and comma, the other two are unique. There are also 20 digits for the positional twenty number system.