The Zaghawa or Beria script, ''Beria Giray Erfe'' ('Zaghawa Writing Marks'), is an indigenous

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

ic script proposed for the Zaghawa language (also known as Beria) of Darfur and Chad. In the 1950s, a Sudanese Zaghawa schoolteacher named Adam Tajir created an alphabet for the Zaghawa language, sometimes known as the camel alphabet, deriving its glyphs from the clan

brand A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create ...

s used for camels and other livestock. He copied the inventory of the Arabic script, so the system was not ideal for Zaghawa. In 2000, a Zaghawa veterinarian named Siddick Adam Issa adapted Tajir's script to a form which has proven popular in the Zaghawa community. The typography is somewhat innovative in that capital letters have

descender In typography and handwriting, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font. For example, in the letter ''y'', the descender is the "tail", or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the ''v'' c ...

s which drop ''below'' the baseline of the lower-case letters and punctuation, contrasting with the capital letters which rise above most lower-case letters in the Latin alphabet. ''Beria Giray Erfe'' is a full alphabet, with independent letters for vowels; however,

diacritic 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 ''diacriti ...

s are used to mark tone ( grave accent for

falling tone A tone contour, or contour tone, is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, Khois ...

and acute accent for rising tone; high, mid, and low tone are unmarked), as well as advanced tongue root vowels (a macron derives from the letters for ). The letter for , which does not occur in Zaghawa or in Arabic, is written by adding a tail to the letter for ; and is derived from the letter for with a cross stroke. There apparently is no letter for , nor a distinction between and , both of which have been reported for Zaghawa. European numerals and punctuation are used.

External links

SIL Zaghawa Beria Font page
with free non-Unicode font and 2007 Unicode proposal.
Preliminary proposal to encode Beria Giray Erfe
in Unicode (2008) {{list of writing systems Saharan languages Alphabets Writing systems of Africa Writing systems introduced in 1950