#fulani language

[babikers]

5 posts!

Ɗuum woni binndanɗe am joyaɓere (blog) e ɗemngal fulani. Yo Geno wallu en.

[languagexs]

Voices of Fula People Across Nigeria: Empowering Fulani Women and Bridging Cultures through Language Access

Uncovering the Vibrant Fulani Culture: Women, Language, and Traditions The Fulani, also known as the Fula or Fulbe people, are a widely dispersed ethnic group found mainly in West Africa and the northern parts of Central Africa. Among their rich cultural tapestry, the Fulani women and the Fulani language stand out as fascinating facets worth exploring. This article delves into the lives,…

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[newsflashuk]

FG Open Radio Station to broadcast in Fulani language

FG Open Radio Station to broadcast in Fulani language

The Federal government has acquired an Amplitude Modulation (AM) radio broadcast licence that would be used to reach out to herdsmen in different locations in Nigeria, as part of effort to end farmers-herders crisis across some states in Nigeria.

Government said it realised that radio is the choice means of news for the herdsmen, hence the need to reach out to them through that means, with…

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[allthingslinguistic]

The Alphabet That Will Save a People From Disappearing

As kids, two Guinean brothers invented a new script for their native language. Now they’re trying to get it on every smartphone.

An interesting long read in The Atlantic about the development of the Adlam script for the Fulani language, and what it means to be a digitally disadvantaged language: 

Fulani’s sounds were rendered imprecisely by the Arabic alphabet, the script most often used to write it; the Latin alphabet presented similar problems. Neither the Arabic nor the Latin alphabets could accurately spell Fulani words that require producing a “b” or a “d” sound while gulping in air, for example, so Fulani speakers had modified both alphabets with new symbols—often in inconsistent ways. [...]

So, in 1990, the brothers started coming up with an alternative. Abdoulaye was 10 years old; Ibrahima was 14.

After school, they’d shut themselves in their rooms to draw, filling blank composition books they brought home from the classroom with the shapes that would make up their new alphabet. They’d take turns drawing letters, and together, assigned sounds to the shapes they came up with.

Six months later, they had a working script. Like Arabic, its 28 letters were written right to left. But unlike Arabic, whose short vowels are written as diacritical marks above and below letters, the script assigned its five vowels proper letters. It looked something like a cursive version of Ethiopic. Ibrahima and Abdoulaye’s parents started taking their project seriously, and invited one of their father’s relatives, who had an influential post in the local government, for a demonstration.

The visitor tested them: With Abdoulaye in the other room, Ibrahima would take dictation. When Abdoulaye returned, he read aloud what his brother had written. They switched and repeated the test. Over and over, the brothers consistently read out the right sounds, even those unique to Fulani. Crucially, they spelled the same complicated words in the same ways, independently of one another.

The visitor turned to their father. “Oh, yes, these kids are being serious,” he said. [...]

“A script is not a biological entity,” said Kamal Mansour, a specialist in non-Latin typography at Monotype who represents the company on the Unicode Consortium. “It doesn’t live alone. It has to have acceptance from people.” [...]

During the decade after that first big test in the brothers’ house, their new alphabet—yet unnamed—spread at an astounding rate. Eventually, it would come to be called Adlam, after its first four letters: the equivalents of a, d, l, and m. The word is also an acronym for a phrase that translates to “the alphabet that will save a people from disappearing.” [...]

In between work and school, the brothers saved up enough to pay for the development of the first Adlam keyboard and font. They found a software company in Seattle that makes specialty fonts, and, in 2008, they were able to type in Adlam for the first time. It was a huge step, but it came with disappointment: Since Adlam was not yet supported by Unicode, if they sent a document written in Adlam to someone without the font installed, the recipient would see only a nonsensical jumble of random, disconnected Arabic letters. That’s when the importance of being included in Unicode sank in. [...]

Abdoulaye and Ibrahima traveled to the 2014 meeting of the Unicode Technical Committee in Sunnyvale, California, to iron out the last kinks in their proposal. That same month, the committee voted to approve Adlam.

“I can’t even describe the feeling,” Abdoulaye said. He tried anyway: “When we got the email that we were officially encoded, we were very, very happy.”

Open up the settings on any smartphone and scroll through the keyboard options. If you’re holding an iPhone, you’ll find Macedonian and Telugu and Catalan—but not Adlam. The alphabet was included in Unicode 9.0, which was published this summer, but technology companies haven’t leapt at the chance to use it in apps and keyboards. [...]

Instead of waiting for official support for Adlam to arrive, some Fulani speakers have gone ahead and created their own apps. Two Android apps already allow smartphone users to text each other in Adlam (as long as both have the “Adlam SMS” app installed) and learn the Adlam alphabet on their device. [...]

Mansour, the Monotype designer, has been involved in type development for decades. He says it’s easy to forget how far things have come since the ’90s, when the internet was dominated almost entirely by the basic Latin alphabet.

“You couldn’t even type Baltic languages like Estonian or Lithuanian. You couldn’t! You had to buy an Eastern European supplement [software package],” Mansour said. “Now, nobody thinks of that. We collectively forget the stages of development that have happened. Now, you could even type Icelandic on an Arabic system, if you wanted.”

Read the whole thing.