Africa Alphabet

Letters created for African languages

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.^[1] Discussion of how to harmonize these with other systems led to several largely abortive proposals such as the African Reference Alphabet and the World Orthography.

Overview

The Africa Alphabet was built from the consonant letters of the English alphabet and the vowel letters, and any additional consonants, of the IPA. Capital forms of IPA letters were invented as necessary. Thus J and Y are pronounced [d͡ʒ] and [j] as in English, while Ɔ, Ɛ and Ŋ are pronounced [ɔ], [ɛ] and [ŋ] as in the IPA.^{[citation needed]}

Characters

1. The capital Ɓ has the form of Ƃ in the original document, which is not the current standard in most languages, but is still preferred for Dan and Kpelle languages of Liberia. Some fonts, such as Gentium, provide for this via character variants.
2. In the original document, the capital Ʒ has the form of a reversed Σ, which is still preferred for Dagbani language in Ghana. Some fonts, such as Gentium, provide for this via character variants.

See also

• African Reference Alphabet
• Latin-script alphabet
• Dinka alphabet
• ISO 6438
• Pan-Nigerian alphabet
• Lepsius Standard Alphabet
• Writing systems of Africa

Notes

1. Sow & Abdulaziz (1993), p. 527

References

• Coulmas, Florian (1996). The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Oxford: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118932667. ISBN 9780631194460.
• International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (1930). Practical Orthography of African Languages (Revised ed.). London: Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 2023-09-28.
• Sow, Alfa I.; Abdulaziz, Mohamed H. (1993). "Language and Social Change". In Mazrui, Ali A. (ed.). General History of Africa. Vol. 8. University of California Press.