Adlam

Adlam was invented by children. In the late 1980s two Fulani brothers in Guinea, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry — still teenagers — were frustrated that their language, Fulani (Pular), was being written in makeshift Arabic that fit it poorly. So they made their own alphabet, right-to-left, with letters tuned to Fulani's sounds, its tones and long vowels.

The name "Adlam" is an acronym of the initials of its first four letters, standing for a Fulani phrase meaning roughly "the alphabet that protects the peoples from vanishing." What began as a family project spread across the Fula world.

Two teenagers, at the kitchen table, gave a language of millions its own letters.

It was added to Unicode in 2016 and is now supported on mainstream phones and operating systems. The Institute keeps its story with the other named-designer scripts in the Inventors' Room on Floor 2 — proof that an alphabet need not be ancient to belong here.

The brothers set themselves a plain brief: a proper fit for Fulani. The result runs right to left, and — unusually for a newly made script — it is bicameral, with UPPER and lower case letters in parallel. Tone and vowel length, which older orthographies blurred, are carried by diacritics. Each capital, starting at U+1E900, has a matching small letter beginning at U+1E922.