The Garay alphabet was designed in 1961, as a transcription system "
arryingAfrican sociolinguistic characteristics" according to its inventor,
Assane Faye. This alphabet has 25 consonants and 14 vowels.
['' The Garay alphabet can contribute to the rebirth of Africa, according to its inventor '']
Birane Hady Cissé, on '' fr.allafrica.com '' (April 21, 2009, accessed November 7, 2018). It is used in particular for the writing of the
Wolof language
Wolof ( ; , ) is a Niger–Congo language spoken by the Wolof people in much of the West African subregion of Senegambia that is split between the countries of Senegal, The Gambia and Mauritania. Like the neighbouring languages Serer and Fula, ...
, spoken mostly in
Senegal
Senegal, officially the Republic of Senegal, is the westernmost country in West Africa, situated on the Atlantic Ocean coastline. It borders Mauritania to Mauritania–Senegal border, the north, Mali to Mali–Senegal border, the east, Guinea t ...
, although that language is more often written in the Latin alphabet and to a lesser extent in the
Arabic (Wolofal) alphabet. It is written from
right to left, and distinguishes
letter case
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing system ...
.
Letters
Consonants
The consonants are written as standalone letters and are not joined as in Arabic.
There is a mark above some letters to show pre-nasalization. The letter labeled
alif
Alif may refer to:
Languages
* Alif (ا) in the Arabic alphabet#Alif, Arabic alphabet, equivalent to aleph, the first letter of many Semitic alphabets
** Dagger alif, superscript alif in Arabic alphabet
* Alif, the first letter of the Urdu alpha ...
is used like its counterpart in Arabic, coming before an initial vowel. Extra to the standard Wolof set is /ħ/, available for Arabic loan words. Lacking is /q/, but /k/ may suffice for that. Also lacking is /nk/, but that may easily be formed with a mark above, like /mb/ etc.
In Garay, uppercase letters are distinguished from lowercase letters by a swash added to one side or the other of the letter. Each sentence begins with a capital letter. Personal names are likewise capitalized.
Garay Alphabet: a Wolof Script
6 May 2019
Vowels
Numbers
Unicode
The Garay alphabet 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 September 2024 with the release of version 16.0.
The Unicode block for Garay is U+10D40–U+10D8F:
References
Bibliography
*
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External links
Discover Garay
Movement of Teachers of African Languages in Senegal (MELAS).
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Writing systems introduced in 1961
Writing systems of Africa
Wolof language
Right-to-left writing systems
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