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Pan-Nigerian Alphabet
The Pan-Nigerian alphabet is a set of 33 Latin letters standardised by the National Language Centre of Nigeria in the 1980s. It is intended to be sufficient to write all the languages of Nigeria without using digraphs. History Several hundred different languages are spoken in Nigeria. The different Latin alphabets made it impractical to create Nigerian typewriters. In the 1980s the National Language Centre (NLC) undertook to develop a single alphabet suitable for writing all the languages of the country, and replacing use of Arabic script, taking as its starting point a model proposed by linguist Kay Williamson in 1981. A typeface was developed in 1985–1986 by Edward Oguejofor and Victor Manfredi, in co-operation with the NLC, with technical assistance from Hermann Zapf. Characters The acute ( ´ ), grave ( ` ) and circumflex ( ˆ ) accents are also used to mark High, Low, and Falling tone respectively. Mid tone (in languages which contrast High, Mid, and Low) is left ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Language Centre
National may refer to: Common uses * Nation or country ** Nationality – a ''national'' is a person who is subject to a nation, regardless of whether the person has full rights as a citizen Places in the United States * National, Maryland, census-designated place * National, Nevada, ghost town * National, Utah, ghost town * National, West Virginia, unincorporated community Commerce * National (brand), a brand name of electronic goods from Panasonic * National Benzole (or simply known as National), former petrol station chain in the UK, merged with BP * National Book Store, a bookstore and office supplies chain in the Philippines * National Car Rental, an American rental car company * National Energy Systems, a former name of Eco Marine Power * National Entertainment Commission, a former name of the Media Rating Council * National Motor Vehicle Company, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA 1900–1924 * National Radio Company, Malden, Massachusetts, USA 1914–1991 * National Supermarket ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multilingual Orthographies
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all Europeans claim to speak at least one language other than their mother tongue; but many read and write in one language. Being multilingual is advantageous for people wanting to participate in trade, globalization and cultural openness. Owing to the ease of access to information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure to multiple languages has become increasingly possible. People who speak several languages are also called ''polyglots''. Multilingual speakers have acquired and maintained at least one language during childhood, the so-called first language (L1). The first language (sometimes also referred to as the mother tongue) is usually acquired without formal edu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Languages Of Nigeria
There are over 520 native languages spoken in Nigeria. The official language is English, which was the language of Colonial Nigeria. The English-based creole ''Nigerian Pidgin'' – first used by the British and African slavers to facilitate the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th century – is the most common lingua franca, spoken by over 60 million people. The most commonly spoken native languages are Hausa (over 63 million when including second-language, or L2, speakers), Yoruba (over 47 million, including L2 speakers), Igbo (over 31 million, including L2 speakers), Ibibio (over 10 million, including L2 speakers), Ijaw cluster (over 5 million), Fulfulde (18 million), Kanuri (7.6 million), Tiv (5 million), and approximately 2 to 3 million each of Nupe, Karai-Karai Kupa, Kakanda, Edo, Igala, Mafa, Idoma and Efik. Nigeria's linguistic diversity is a microcosm of much of Africa as a whole, and the country contains languages from the three major African langu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Writing Systems Of Africa
The writing systems of Africa are the current and historical writing systems used on the Africa, African continent, both those which are indigenous and those which were introduced. In many African societies, History of Africa, history was traditionally oral tradition, recorded orally despite most societies having developed a writing script, leading to them being termed ''"oral cultures"'' in contrast to ''"literate cultures"''. However, this generalization misses the significant pre-modern use of written languages in various African cultures and the widespread modern adoption of written language on the continent. Today, the Latin script is commonly encountered across much of Africa, especially in the regions of Western Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa. The Arabic script is mainly used in North Africa. Among the indigenous writing systems, the Ge'ez alphabet, Ge'ez script is widely used in the Horn of Africa, and the Tifinagh script is used in many parts of the Sahel regi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin Alphabets
The lists and tables below summarize and compare the letter inventories of some of the Latin-script alphabets. In this article, the scope of the word "alphabet" is broadened to include letters with tone marks, and other diacritics used to represent a wide range of orthographic traditions, without regard to whether or how they are sequenced in their alphabet or the table. Parentheses indicate characters not used in modern standard orthographies of the languages, but used in obsolete and/or dialectal forms. Letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet Alphabets that contain only ISO basic Latin letters Among alphabets for natural languages the English, 6/sup> Indonesian, and Malay alphabets only use the 26 letters in both cases. Among alphabets for constructed languages the Ido and Interlingua alphabets only use the 26 letters, while Toki Pona uses a 14-letter subset. Extended by ligatures * German (ß), Scandinavian (æ) Extended by diacritical marks * ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vietnamese Alphabet
The Vietnamese alphabet (, ) is the modern writing script for the Vietnamese language. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages like French language, French, originally developed by Francisco de Pina (1585–1625), a missionary from Portugal. The Vietnamese alphabet contains 29 Letter (alphabet), letters, including 7 letters using four diacritics: , , , , , , and . There are an additional 5 diacritics used to designate Tonal language, tone (as in , , , , and ). The complex vowel system and the large number of letters with diacritics, which can stack twice on the same letter (e.g. meaning 'first'), makes it easy to distinguish the Vietnamese orthography from other writing systems that use the Latin alphabets, Latin script. The Vietnamese system's use of diacritics produces an accurate transcription for Tonal Languages, tones despite the limitations of the Roman alphabet. On the other hand, sound changes in the spoken language have led to different letters, digraphs an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lepsius Standard Alphabet
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, published in 1853, 1854 and 1855, and in a revised edition in 1863. The alphabet was comprehensive but was not used much as it contained a lot of diacritic marks and was difficult to read and typeset at that time. It was, however, influential in later projects such as Ellis's Paleotype, and diacritics such as the acute accent for palatalization, under-dot for retroflex, underline for Arabic emphatics, and the click letters continue in modern use. Vowels Vowel length is indicated by a macron (''ā'') or a breve (''ă'') for long and short vowels, respectively. Open vowels are marked by a line under the letter (''e̱''), while a dot below the letter makes it a close vowel (''ẹ''). Rounded front vowels are written with an umlaut (''ö'' an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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. Developed separately from the African reference alphabet but apparently based on the same data sets, it has had little use; its forms are retained in Unicode. FreeDOS calls this Code Page 65504. Character set * Prior to Unicode 7.0, mapped to .Prior to Unicode 8.0, mapped to . See also * Africa Alphabet *African Reference Alphabet The African Reference Alphabet is a largely defunct continent-wide guideline for the creation of Latin alphabets for African languages. Two variants of the initial proposal (one in English and a second in French) were made at a 1978 UNESCO-organi ... * Dinka alphabet * Pan-Nigerian alphabet * Lepsius Standard Alphabet References External links"Coded Character Set for African Languages" (June 15, 1979)ISO 6438:1983 "Documentation -- African coded character set for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 alphabet developed for the southern Sudanese languages at the Rejaf language conference in 1928. Prior to this, several attempts at adapting the Arabic and Latin scripts to the Dinka language were made, but neither effort was met with large success. Christian missionaries were essential to the development of what became the Dinka alphabet. Alphabet Dinka does not use ''f, q, s, v, x'', and ''z''; and ''h'' is used in digraphs only. IPA Dental consonants are distinguished from alveolar by adding a following ''h''. Otherwise, consonants match with their IPA equivalents, except /ɲ/, which is written as ''ny''; /ɟ/, written ''j''; /j/, written ''y''; and /ɾ/, written ''r''. Plain vowels match their IPA equivalents, and the diaeresis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African Reference Alphabet
The African Reference Alphabet is a largely defunct continent-wide guideline for the creation of Latin alphabets for African languages. Two variants of the initial proposal (one in English and a second in French) were made at a 1978 UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger. They were based on the results of several earlier conferences on the harmonization of established Latin alphabets of individual languages. The 1978 conference recommended the use of single letters for speech sounds rather than of Digraph (orthography), letter sequences or of letters with diacritics. A substantial overhaul was proposed in 1982 but was rejected in a follow-up conference held in Niamey in 1984. Since then, continent-wide harmonization has been largely abandoned, because regional needs, practices and thus preferences differ greatly across Africa. Through the individual languages that were its basis, the African Reference Alphabet inherits from the Africa Alphabet, and like the latter uses ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Africa Alphabet
The Africa Alphabet (also International African Alphabet or IAI alphabet) is a set of letters designed as the basis for Latin alphabets for the languages of Africa. It was initially developed in 1928 by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures from a combination of the English alphabet and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Development was assisted by native speakers of African languages and led by Diedrich Hermann Westermann, who served as director of the organization from 1926 to 1939. The aim of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, later renamed the International African Institute (IAI), was to enable people to write for practical and scientific purposes in all African languages without the need of diacritics. The Africa Alphabet influenced the development of orthographies of many African languages, serving "as the basis for the transcription" of about 60 by one count. Discussion of how to harmonize these with other syste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
