African reference alphabet

The proposal of an African reference alphabet was the result of a conference at Niamey in 1978 organized by the UNESCO. The alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended to use single letters for a sound (actually a phoneme) instead of using two or three-letter combinations or letters with diacritical marks.

The proposal included eight diacritics - acute, gravis, circumflex, hacek, macron to mark tone, a tilde to mark nasalization and a subscript dot and an underline mark. The trema was used for some vowels.

A typewriter keyboard was proposed as well: for the additional characters the uppercase letters had to be given up. Probably for this reason the keyboard did not get used. However the proposal of the additional characters as such is valuable as it reflects the needs for writing African languages. On the other side in quite some orthographies of African languages two-letter-combinations are used for representing additional sounds.

See also Africa Alphabet

Source: A Thesaurus of African Languages - A classified and annotated inventory of the spoken languages of Africa - Michael Mann and David Dalby, International African Institute, Hans Zell Publishers, 1987