INVENTING A NEW ALPHABET

MICROSOFT AND MCCANN WORLDGROUP

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THERE ARE ABOUT 7,000 SPOKEN languages in the world today, and at least 40% of them exist without a written alphabet. French may be an official language across much of Central and Western Africa, but there are many other commonly spoken languages, including Pulaar, also known as Fulfulde, the lingua franca of 40 million Fulani people. Now, thanks to decades of work by two brothers born in the region, culminating in partnerships with Microsoft and ad giant Mccann, Pulaar has its own alphabet, with a sleek new design for the internet. “We couldn’t write our language properly,” says Abdoulaye Barry, who grew up in Guinea in the 1980s. Abdoulaye was only 10, his brother Ibrahima just 14, when they began devising an early handwritten form, with 28 original letters and 10 numerals. They would name it ADLAM—AN acronym for Alkule Danday e Leñol Mulugol, which means “the alphabet that will prevent the culture, the people, from disappearing,” Abdoulaye says. After moving to Portland, Oregon, in the early 2000s, they continued promoting ADLAM and began making inroads into the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit that sets the standard for representing text on digital devices. In 2016, ADLAM was included in the Unicode 9.0 release; in 2019, Microsoft included it in Windows. In 2022, the Barrys and a group of typeface designers collaborated with Microsoft and Mccann to create a revised font, ADLAM Display. Released in April 2023 as a free download across multiple platforms worldwide, alongside a set of classroom materials, the easier-to-read ADLAM Display is helping accelerate adoption of the alphabet and spread Pulaar literacy across West Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S. The brothers are especially proud that women in the Fulani community are learning the alphabet to run their small businesses. Abdoulaye says ADLAM is inspiring speakers of some other African languages to work on their own alphabets. “Because they now know what we’ve known for a long time: If you want to save your language, you have to be able to write it.”