The alphabets African languages are written in, including two invented from scratch

Look down the writing-system column of our African languages dataset and Latin is nearly everywhere. That is the answer to the question, and it is the least interesting thing about it.

Latin is the newest arrival. Underneath it sit an alphabet created in the Kingdom of Aksum in the first centuries AD, one the Tuareg have used since antiquity, an Arabic-derived tradition that predates European contact by centuries, and two scripts invented within living memory by people whose names we know.

Ge'ez, still in daily use after seventeen centuries

Amharic 🇪🇹, with 60 million speakers, and Tigrinya 🇪🇷, with 9.7 million, are written in Ge'ez. It is an abugida, which means each character carries a consonant and a vowel together rather than one sound each, and Ethiopians call it Fidel.

It was created in the Kingdom of Aksum somewhere between the first and fourth centuries AD, developing from the Ancient South Arabian script that reached the region around 800 BC. It has been in continuous use ever since. Amharic's own name for itself, አማርኛ, is written in it.

Tifinagh, older than the borders

Tamazight 🇲🇦 has 25 million speakers and is written in Tifinagh, a script the Tuareg have used since antiquity across the Sahel. Its autonym, ⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵜ, uses characters that look like nothing else on the continent: circles, crosses, dots and lines.

Morocco 🇲🇦 made Tamazight an official language in 2011 and adopted Tifinagh for it, which put an ancient script on modern road signs and government letterhead. The language is also written in Latin and Arabic, depending on who is doing the writing and why.

Ajami, the writing colonisers found already there

Long before Latin arrived, West and East African languages were written in modified Arabic, a family of practices known as Ajami. Our dataset records it running under a lot of the continent's biggest languages:

Hausa's Ajami tradition is still live enough that our dataset lists the language as written in both Latin, called Boko, and Arabic script. Swahili was written in Ajami for centuries before the Latin alphabet displaced it. Somali carried both Ajami and the Osmanya script until Latin was made official in 1972, which is recent enough that plenty of people alive today learned to write another way first.

N'Ko, invented in 1949 to prove a point

Solomana Kanté devised N'Ko in Guinea 🇬🇳 in 1949 for the Manding languages, which include Bambara. He built it in response to the claim, then widely made, that Africa had produced no writing system of its own.

The name means "I say" in every Manding language. It also solved a practical problem: Ajami handled the tones of Mandé languages badly, and N'Ko was designed around the sounds actually being spoken rather than borrowed from a language that did not have them.

Adlam, invented in 1989 by two children

Fula is spoken by 40 million people across roughly twenty countries, from Senegal 🇸🇳 to Sudan 🇸🇩, and for most of its history it was written only in scripts borrowed from somewhere else. That bothered two brothers in Guinea 🇬🇳.

In 1989, Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry, then ten and fourteen, started building an alphabet from first principles. After school they would sit in their room, say Fula sounds aloud, and take turns sketching shapes for them. One of their methods was to close their eyes, draw lines, then look at what they had made and decide which shapes felt like which sounds. Within a few months they had a full character set.

They called it Adlam, an acronym of its first four letters, standing for Alkule Dandayɗe Leñol Mulugol: the alphabet that protects the peoples from vanishing. It has 28 letters and its own numerals, and unlike Arabic its digits run right to left in the same direction as its text.

Adlam is now in Unicode, at the block starting U+1E900, which means it works on a phone. A script two children invented in a bedroom is supported by the same standard that carries English.

The one that came from Borneo

Malagasy has 25 million speakers and is the outlier in every column. It is the only Austronesian language spoken in Africa, and it is on Madagascar 🇲🇬 because seafarers from the Barito river region of southern Borneo crossed about 7,000 kilometres of open Indian Ocean in outrigger canoes roughly 1,500 years ago.

It was historically written in Sorabe, an Arabic-based script, before Latin. So the language of an island off the coast of Mozambique, carried there from Indonesia, was first written down using an alphabet from the Arabian peninsula.

What the column actually says

Read the writing-system column as a history rather than a fact and it stops being boring. Guinea 🇬🇳 alone has three systems in current use for its languages: Latin, N'Ko and Adlam. Two of those are younger than most of the people reading this.

Fula's twenty-country spread is also a reminder that a language does not respect a border, even when the border makes its speakers apply for a visa to cross it. Our visa rules dataset covers what that actually costs.