Two brothers Help Save Fulani by Providing It with an Alphabet
Dear Fellow Earthlings,
In today's blog I provide information about the contributions brothers Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry have made to the preservation of the Fulani language. Single-handedly, beginning when the brothers were only 10 and 14 years of age, back in the 1990, Abdoulaye and Ibrahima began crafting an alphabet for a language that until that time had been written using either Arabic-based or Roman-based letters.
In an amazing display of the determination, the Barry brothers came up with a 28-letter alphabet that included 5 vowels and 23 consonants to help add a bulwark to the Fulani language, spoken by around 40,000,000 people, but facing degradation and sometimes thought to be a language "of lower status" due to the fact that it had had no official writing system.
Also known as "Pula" Fulani is spoken by former nomads in a wide swath of Africa stretching from Senegal in the west to Sudan in the east. The Barry brothers are from from Guinea in west Africa. Fulani is the language they grew up speaking -- but had received their schooling in the French language.
It was in the early 1990s when these brothers began to realize that it would be a wonderful thing if Fulani could be written using letters designed especially to represent its inventory of phonemes. Despite the fact that Abdoulaye andIbrahima were only 10 and 14 years old, respectively, they set about trying to create written symbols that would represent the sound inventory of Fulani.
After a lot of trial-and-error, spiced with plenty of ambition and talent, the Barry brothers came up with a writing system. First they made sure that the two of them could both produce the symbols in writing and read the symbols when written by each brother to the other. Next, they had their father and various scholars check the validity of what they had come up with.
Soon they were teaching the system to their little sister and to various friends -- and it was accepted with great enthusiasm. As the years passed, the Barry brothers, in their travels to other parts of west and north central Africa, would discover -- quite happily -- that people were not only writing letters to each other using Fulani, but even reading books that had been published using their script.
The script is now referred at as Adlam, short for Alkule Dandayɗe Leñol Mulugol, whose English
translation would be "the alphabet that will prevent my people from falling into ignorance."
Formerly considered to be a language of the uneducated, now Fulani can be written down
for all to see. Issues of particular concern to the Fulani speaking peoples of west and north central Africa can now be printed out or even texted. There is more hope than ever that Fulani will continue to be a vibrant, living language!
And there you have it: two more friends of Earth!
Steve Walker
Earthsaver and Jingles Creator
© 2013 Steve Walker, The Jingles-The Japan Foundation for English Pronunciation, Summit Enterprises.