Following independence, the government of

Guinea Guinea, officially the Republic of Guinea, is a coastal country in West Africa. It borders the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Guinea-Bissau to the northwest, Senegal to the north, Mali to the northeast, Côte d'Ivoire to the southeast, and Sier ...

adopted rules of transcription for the

languages of Guinea The Republic of Guinea is a multilingual country, with over 40 languages spoken. The official language is French. Several indigenous languages have been given the status of national languages: Fula (or Pular); Malinké (or Maninka); Susu; ...

based on the characters and diacritic combinations available on typewriters of that period. This alphabet was used officially until 1989.

Guinea language orthography

The Guinea alphabet made use of several digraphs (including either "h" or "y" as the second letter), some of which represent consonants not present in European languages, and two

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 ''diacrit ...

s (

grave accent The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other Western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other ...

and diaeresis) for open vowels. This system was widely used within the country but differed from the orthographies of neighboring countries of

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 ...

, as developed in the wake of the 1966 Bamako expert meeting on harmonizing orthographies of the cross-border languages of the region. In 1989, following a meeting on reform of the alphabet in 1988, it was decided to adopt an orthography similar to the

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 ...

used elsewhere in the region.Effectuated by decree 019/PRG/SGG/89 A summary table of the digraphs and diacritics of the old alphabet, and their extended Latin equivalents in the new system, follows: :

References

* Latin alphabets Writing systems of Africa Multilingual orthographies 1989 disestablishments in Africa {{Latin-script-stub