The Brothers' Notebook

The name is a mission statement compressed into four letters: the alphabet that keeps a people from vanishing.

Alkule Dandayɗe Leñol Mulugol — the acronym behind “Adlam”

§1 of 5The Brief

In 1989, in Nzérékoré in southern Guinea, two brothers decided their language needed an alphabet. Ibrahima Barry was about fourteen. Abdoulaye was about ten.

Their language is Fulani — Pular, Fulfulde, Pulaar depending on where you stand — spoken by tens of millions of people across a band of West Africa running from Senegal to Sudan. It was, and largely still is, written in two borrowed scripts. Neither works well.

Arabic script came with Islam and centuries of West African scholarship, in the adapted form known as Ajami. It has no clean way to write Fulani's vowel system and its implosive consonants, so Ajami spelling is approximate and varies by writer. Latin script came with colonial schooling and French, and needs a scaffolding of diacritics and special letters to do the same job — and arrives attached to the language of the administration.

The brothers' brief, as they have described it since, began from watching adults struggle to read letters written in Ajami and concluding that the problem was the script rather than the reader. The name they gave the result states the brief exactly: Adlam is an acronym of its first four letters, standing for Alkule Dandayɗe Leñol Mulugol — the alphabet that protects the peoples from vanishing.

§2 of 5The Constraints

The phonological constraint is what defeated both incumbents. Fulani has a five-vowel system with contrastive length, a set of implosive and prenasalised consonants, and consonant mutation that changes the initial sound of a word by grammatical context. A script that writes vowels approximately makes the grammar hard to read, not merely the vocabulary.

The geographic constraint was that Fulani is spoken across a dozen countries with different official languages and different colonial alphabets. Anything tied to one national orthography would be a script for one country.

The constraint that mattered most was that they had no institution of any kind. Two schoolboys, a notebook, and no adult sponsor.

That constraint is what makes the chapter the mirror of Sejong's. A king can decree a script and publish a rationale. Two teenagers must produce something so obviously better than the alternatives that adults will adopt it on the evidence — and then spend decades doing the teaching themselves.

§3 of 5The Decisions

The first decision was completeness: a letter for every sound Fulani distinguishes, including the implosives and the long vowels, so that nothing is left to be inferred and no diacritic scaffolding is needed to patch a foreign inventory. Twenty-eight letters, plus marks for tone and nasalisation and its own set of digits.

The second decision was direction — right to left, like the Ajami tradition their readers already knew, and unlike the Latin of the schools.

The third decision is the one that surprises people who work on scripts: Adlam is bicameral. It has capital and small letters. Almost no script invented in the modern era bothers — case is a historical accident of the Latin tradition, inherited rather than designed, as the Machinery of Text series records. Building it deliberately into a new alphabet is a choice about what a modern literate script is expected to look like, and it means Adlam can carry the typographic conventions of contemporary publishing without improvisation.

The fourth decision was the one their predecessors in this series mostly made too, and it took the brothers thirty years: supply the corpus and the teaching. They wrote textbooks, taught by hand, and eventually founded Winden Jangen Adlam to organise the instruction. A script with nothing to read is a curiosity — the same finding as chapters three, four and eight.

§4 of 5The Adoption Curve

For roughly twenty years the curve looks like N'Ko's: no state, no funding, no press, spread by teaching, association and hand-copied material across borders that the language ignores.

Then it does something no earlier chapter in this series could have done, because the mechanism did not exist. In 2014 the script was proposed for Unicode; in June 2016 it was encoded in Unicode 9.0 at U+1E900. Google's Noto programme produced Noto Sans Adlam. Microsoft added keyboard and rendering support. Within a few years of encoding, a Fulani speaker could type Adlam on an ordinary phone.

That is the fastest route from invention to platform in the history of writing, and it is worth being precise about why. It is not that Adlam is better designed than Hangul — the point is that after 1991 there is a queue, a committee and a standard to join, and joining it converts a community script into something every device can render. The dossier on how that queue works is Admission Procedures.

What has not happened is state adoption. Adlam is not the official orthography of Fulani anywhere; the national alphabets remain Latin. The curve is a platform curve, not a policy one, and this building does not report unsourced user numbers for a script whose spread is organised by voluntary associations.

§5 of 5The Verdict

The design deserves the credit the design earns: a complete, shallow, well-fitted alphabet that writes Fulani exactly, needs no diacritic scaffolding on a borrowed inventory, and was demonstrably learnable by the people it was made for, because two children taught it to adults before any institution took an interest.

But the finding this chapter contributes to the series is not about letterforms. Every previous inventor faced the same last problem — how do you get a script rendered, printed, cut, carried? Wulfila needed scribes. Evans cast type from tea-chest lead. Sequoyah needed a press at New Echota and lost it. Kanté hand-copied for forty years. The bottleneck was always manufacture.

Adlam is the first chapter here where that bottleneck is a queue rather than a workshop. The barrier moved from metal to committee — from whether anyone can make the type to whether the Unicode Technical Committee accepts the proposal. That is a lower barrier and a narrower gate, and it is now the gate every new script must pass.

Two teenagers in 1989 could not have known that the gate would exist. They built the alphabet anyway and were ready when it opened. See the registry plaque, “I Say” for the N'Ko chapter it rhymes with, and the Inventors' Room.