The Kpelle

syllabary In the Linguistics, linguistic study of Written language, written languages, a syllabary is a set of grapheme, written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) mora (linguistics), morae which make up words. A symbol in a syllaba ...

was invented c. 1935 by Chief Gbili of Sanoyie,

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 ...

. It was intended for writing the

Kpelle language The Kpelle language (endonym: "Kpɛlɛɛ") is spoken by the Kpelle people of Liberia, Guinea and Ivory Coast and is part of the Mande language family. Guinean Kpelle (also known as ''Guerze'' in French), spoken by half a million people, is conc ...

, a member of the

Mande Mande may refer to: * Mandé peoples of western Africa * Mande languages, their Niger-Congo languages * Manding languages, Manding, a term covering a subgroup of Mande peoples, and sometimes used for one of them, Mandinka people, Mandinka * Garo p ...

group of Niger-Congo languages spoken by about 490,000 people in Liberia and around 300,000 people in

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 ...

at that time. The syllabary consists of 88

graphemes In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived from Ancient Greek ('write'), and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other emic units. The study of graphemes ...

and is written from left to right in horizontal rows. Many of the

glyphs A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

have more than one form. It was used to some extent by speakers of Kpelle in

and

during the 1930s and early 1940s but never achieved popular acceptance. It has been classed as a failed script.Unseth, Peter. 2011. Invention of Scripts in West Africa for Ethnic Revitalization. In ''The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts'', ed. by Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García, pp. 23-32. New York: Oxford University Press. Today Kpelle is written with a version of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

References

Kpelle people Writing systems of Africa Writing systems introduced in 1935 {{writingsystem-stub