The Vai syllabary is a syllabic writing system devised for the

Vai language The Vai language, also called Vy or Gallinas, is a Mande language spoken by the Vai people, roughly 104,000 in Liberia, and by smaller populations, some 15,500, in Sierra Leone. Writing system Vai is noteworthy for being one of the few African ...

by Momolu Duwalu Bukele of Jondu, in what is now Grand Cape Mount County,

Liberia Liberia, officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to Liberia–Sierra Leone border, its northwest, Guinea to Guinea–Liberia border, its north, Ivory Coast to Ivory Coast–Lib ...

. Bukele is regarded within the Vai community, as well as by most scholars, as the syllabary's inventor and chief promoter when it was first documented in the 1830s. It is one of the two most successful indigenous scripts in

West Africa West Africa, also known as Western Africa, is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations geoscheme for Africa#Western Africa, United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Gha ...

in terms of the number of current users and the availability of literature written in the script, the other being

N'Ko NKo (ߒߞߏ), also spelled N'Ko, is an alphabetic script devised by Solomana Kante, Solomana Kanté in 1949, as a modern writing system for the Manding languages of West Africa. The term ''NKo'', which means ''I say'' in all Manding languages, i ...

Structure of the script

Vai is a syllabic script written from left to right that represents CV

syllables A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

; a final nasal is written with the same glyph as the Vai syllabic nasal. Originally there were separate glyphs for syllables ending in a nasal, such as ''don,'' with a long vowel, such as ''soo,'' with a diphthong, such as ''bai,'' as well as ''bili'' and ''sɛli.'' However, these have been dropped from the modern script. The syllabary did not distinguish all the syllables of the

until the 1960s when the University of Liberia added distinctions by modifying certain glyphs with dots or extra strokes to cover all CV syllables in use. There are relatively few glyphs for nasal vowels because only a few occur with each consonant. The symbols used to write words evolved to become visually simpler over time, and an analysis has shown that they can do so over just a few generations.

Possible link with Cherokee

In the 1960s scholars began suggesting that the

Cherokee syllabary The Cherokee syllabary is a syllabary invented by Sequoyah in the late 1810s and early 1820s to write the Cherokee language. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy as he was illiterate until its creation. He first experimen ...

of North America may have provided a model for the design of the Vai syllabary in Liberia. The Vai syllabary emerged about 1832/33. This was at a time when American missionaries were working to use the Cherokee syllabary as a model for writing Liberian languages. Another link may have been

Cherokee The Cherokee (; , or ) people are one of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, they were concentrated in their homelands, in towns along river valleys of what is now southwestern ...

who emigrated to Liberia after the invention of the Cherokee syllabary (which in its early years spread rapidly among the Cherokee) but before the invention of the Vai syllabary. One such man, Cherokee Austin Curtis, married into a prominent Vai family and became an important Vai chief himself. The romantic "inscription on a house" that first drew the world's attention to the existence of the Vai script was in fact on the home of Curtis, a Cherokee.

What we can be reasonably sure about is that Curtis was not only a well-connected and influential man within the Vai community, but one who spoke the Vai language and adopted Vai customs, who settled in Vai country some four years before the invention of the Vai script, and who later appears to have welcomed the use of the script on his house. ''If'' Curtis was informed about the Cherokee script, ''if'' he was already resident at Cape Mount by 1827/28, and ''if'' he made contact with any of the mission party at Big Town - Revey or even his Vai-speaking assistants – it is conceivable that the notion of a syllabary reached the Vai by this route – but perhaps not very likely. Finally, whether the argument from coincidence should have any weight is difficult to say, but that two new scripts sharing the same basic structure, invented a continent apart within little more than a decade of each other, can each be linked, however tenuously (given the limited evidence), to the same individual, may reasonably be regarded as at least singular. (Tuchscherer and Hair 2002)

Syllables

Additional syllables

Punctuation

Vai has distinct basic punctuation marks: Additional punctuation marks are taken from European usage.

Historical symbols

Logograms

The oldest Vai texts used various

logogram In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek 'word', and 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chine ...

s. Of these, only and are still in use. * Modern ; at the time now-obsolete ꘑ was used for .

Digits

Vai uses

Arabic numerals The ten Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9) are the most commonly used symbols for writing numbers. The term often also implies a positional notation number with a decimal base, in particular when contrasted with Roman numera ...

(0–9). In the 1920s Vai-specific digits were developed but never adopted:

Book of Rora

One of Momolu Duwalu Bukele's cousins, Kaali Bala Ndole Wano, wrote a long manuscript around 1845 called the ''Book of Ndole'' or ''Book of Rora'' under the

pen name A pen name or nom-de-plume is a pseudonym (or, in some cases, a variant form of a real name) adopted by an author and printed on the title page or by-line of their works in place of their real name. A pen name may be used to make the author's na ...

Rora. This roughly fifty page manuscript contains several now obsolete symbols:

Unicode

The Vai syllabary was added to the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1. In Windows 7 and earlier, since this version only gives names for characters released in Unicode 5.0 and earlier, the names will either be blank (Microsoft Word applications) or "Undefined" (Character Map). The Unicode block for Vai is U+A500–U+A63F. Code points in this block are contiguous without the gaps shown in the "Syllables" table above.

Notes

External links

Ethnologue on VaiInput tool and Unicode font for using Vai on Windows XPSIL on Vai
{{list of writing systems Syllabary writing systems Writing systems of Africa Vai language Constructed scripts 1830 introductions 1830 establishments in Africa Writing systems introduced in the 19th century