Boston University: Unearthing a Long Ignored African Writing System, One Researcher Finds African History, by Africans
Boston University: Unearthing a Long Ignored African Writing System, One Researcher Finds African History, by Africans. “In the same way that the Roman alphabet has been adopted to write English, French, and Spanish languages, [Fallou] Ngom’s research revealed that people in Senegal, Guinea, Nigeria, and other parts of West Africa use a modified Arabic alphabet to write in a number of local languages: Wolof, Hausa, Fula, Mandinka, Swahili, Amharic, Tigrigna, and Berber among them. It was an enormous discovery. This writing system, called Ajami, dispelled the false notion peddled by European colonialists that large swaths of communities in sub-Saharan Africa were illiterate, with no native written languages of their own.”