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An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed
alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letter (alphabet), letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character ...
was revised in 1982. The conference recommended the use of single
letter Letter, letters, or literature may refer to: Characters typeface * Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet. * Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alphabe ...
s for a sound (that is, a
phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
) instead of using
two 2 (two) is a number, numeral and digit. It is the natural number following 1 and preceding 3. It is the smallest and only even prime number. Because it forms the basis of a duality, it has religious and spiritual significance in many cultu ...
or three-letter combinations, or letters with
diacritical marks A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
. The African Reference Alphabet is clearly related to the Africa Alphabet and reflected practice based on the latter (including use of
IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners A ...
characters). The Niamey conference also built on work of a previous UNESCO-organized meeting on harmonization of transcriptions of African languages, that was held in
Bamako Bamako ( bm, ߓߡߊ߬ߞߐ߬ ''Bàmakɔ̌'', ff, 𞤄𞤢𞤥𞤢𞤳𞤮 ''Bamako'') is the capital and largest city of Mali, with a 2009 population of 1,810,366 and an estimated 2022 population of 2.81 million. It is located on the Niger Rive ...
, Mali, in 1966.


1978 version

Separate versions of the conference's report were produced in English and French. Different images of the alphabet were used in the two versions, and there are a number of differences between the two. The English version proposed an alphabet of 57 letters, given in both upper and lower-case forms. Eight of these are formed from common Latin letters with the addition of an underline mark (_). Some of the glyphs (two uppercase forms and , one lowercase form ) cannot be accurately represented in Unicode (as of version 13, March 2020). This version also listed eight accents (
acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed cha ...
(´),
grave accent The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and many other western European languages, as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other languages usin ...
(`),
circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...
(ˆ),
caron A caron (), háček or haček (, or ; plural ''háčeks'' or ''háčky'') also known as a hachek, wedge, check, kvačica, strešica, mäkčeň, varnelė, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, flying bird, inverted chevron, is a diacritic mark (� ...
(ˇ), macron (¯),
tilde The tilde () or , is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin '' titulus'', meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...
(˜),
trema Trema may refer to: * a Greek and Latin root meaning ''hole'' * ''Tréma'', a word in French meaning diaeresis ** more generally, two dots (diacritic) * ''Trema'' (plant), a genus of about 15 species of small evergreen trees * Tréma (record la ...
(¨), and a superscript dot (˙) and nine punctuation marks (? ! ( ) « » , ; .). In the French version, the letters were hand-printed in lower case only. Only 56 of the letters in the English version were listed – omitting the hooktop-z – and two further apostrophe-like letters (ʾ and ʿ) were included for � and ʕ Also, five of the letters were written with a subscript dot instead of an underscore as in the English version (ḍ ḥ ṣ ṭ and ẓ). (These represent Arabic-style emphatic consonants while the remaining underlined letters (c̱, q̱ and x̱) represent clicks.) Accents and punctuation do not appear. The French and English sets are otherwise identical. Notes: * Ɑ/ɑ is "Latin alpha" () not "Latin script a" (). In Unicode, Latin alpha and are not considered as separate characters. * The upper case I, the counterpart of the lower case i, does not have crossbars () while the upper case counterpart of the lower case ɪ has them (). * The letter “Z with tophook” () is not included in Unicode. *c̱, q̱, x̱ represent click consonants (ǀ, ǃ, ǁ respectively), but the line under is optional, and usually not used. *c, j represent either palatal stops or postalveolar affricates. ɖ, ʈ are the retroflex stops, as in the IPA. *ƒ, ʋ represent bilabial fricatives. *Although digraphs using h are normally used to represent aspirated consonants, in languages in which those are absent, the digraphs can be used instead of ʒ, ʃ, θ, ɣ... *Digraphs with m or n are used for prenasalized consonants, with w and y for labialized and palatalized consonants; kp and gb are used for labial-velar stops; hl and dl are used for lateral fricatives. *ɓ, ɗ are used for implosives, and ƭ, ƙ for either ejectives or voiceless implosives. ƴ is used for �ʲ *Nasalization is either written with a nasal consonant following the vowel, or with a tilde. Tone is indicated using the acute accent, grave accent, caron, macron, and circumflex. Diaeresis is used for centralized vowels, and vowel length is indicated by doubling the vowel. *Segmentation should be done according to each language's own phonology and morphology.


1982 version

The 1982 revision of the alphabet was made by Michael Mann and David Dalby, who had attended the Niamey conference. It has 60 letters; some are quite different from the 1978 version. Another key feature of this alphabet is that it included only lower-case letters, making it unicase. A typewriter keyboard was proposed as well: for the additional characters, the uppercase letters had to be given up. It was probably for this reason that the keyboard did not get used. The 32nd letter “” is called ''linearized
tilde The tilde () or , is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin '' titulus'', meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...
''.Mann, Michael; Dalby, David: ''A Thesaurus of African Languages'', London 1987, , p. 210 This character is not included in Unicode (as of version 14, September 2021), but can be represented by ɴ (U+0274 ).


See also

* Africa Alphabet *
Dinka alphabet The Dinka alphabet is used by South Sudanese Dinka people. The written Dinka language is based on the ISO basic Latin alphabet, but with some added letters adapted from the International Phonetic Alphabet. The current orthography is derived from the ...
*
ISO 6438 ISO 6438:1983, ''Documentation — African coded character set for bibliographic information interchange'', is an ISO standard for an 8-bit character encoding for African languages. It has had little use (such as being available through UNIMARC). I ...
* Pan-Nigerian alphabet *
Standard Alphabet by Lepsius The Standard Alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet developed by Karl Richard Lepsius. Lepsius initially used it to transcribe Egyptian hieroglyphs in his '' Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien'' and extended it to write African languages, publis ...


References


Further reading

*Mann, Michael, and David Dalby. 1987. ''A thesaurus of African languages: A classified and annotated inventory of the spoken languages of Africa with an appendix on their written representation''. London: Hans Zell Publishers. {{ISBN, 0-905450-24-8


External links

*
African Languages: Proceedings of the meeting of experts on the transcription and harmonization of African languages, Niamey (Niger), 17–21 July 1978
', Paris: UNESCO, 1981 *http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=IntlNiameyKybd *http://www.bisharat.net/Documents/Niamey78annex.htm Latin alphabets Writing systems of Africa Latin-script letters Writing systems introduced in 1978 Phonetic alphabets