Adlam script


The Adlam script is a recently invented script used to write Fulani. The name Adlam is an acronym derived from the first four letters of the alphabet, standing for Alkule Dandayɗe Leñol Mulugol "the alphabet that protects the peoples from vanishing".
While teenagers in the late 1980s, brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry devised the alphabetic script to transcribe the Fulani language. After several years of development it began to be widely adopted among Fulani communities, and is currently taught in Guinea, Nigeria, Liberia and other nearby countries. It is one of many indigenous scripts developed for specific languages in West Africa.
Adlam is supported in Google's Android and Chrome operating systems. There are also Android apps to send SMS in Adlam and to learn the alphabet. On computers running Microsoft Windows, the Adlam script is natively supported as part of the feature update of Windows 10 version 1903 build 18252.

Letters

Adlam has case. Supplemental letters are used for other languages or for loanwords. See Omniglot in the external links for the pronunciation of the basic letters

Diacritics

Adlam has a number of diacritics. The 'consonant' modifier is used to derive additional consonants, mostly from Arabic, similar to e.g. s > š in Latin script.
DiacriticDescription
◌?long 'ā'
◌?long vowel
◌?long consonant
◌?glottal stop
◌?consonant modifier*
◌?long modified consonant
◌?dot*
?Used between n and another consonant to indicate that they constitute a prenasalized consonant

* The háček-shaped consonant modifier is added to the Adlam letters a, g, h for Arabic ain, gh, h, and to s, t, d, j for the emphatic consonants ṣ, ṭ, ḍ, ẓ. To indicate the consonant is long, the combined long-modified diacritic is used. The dot diacritic is placed above the s and j to derive Arabic th and z, and above e and o to indicate a higher/closer vowel quality. When those are lengthened, the normal length diacritic is used, and the dot is placed under the letter.

Digits

Unlike in Arabic script, Adlam digits go in the same direction as letters.
AdlamHindu-Arabic
?0
?1
?2
?3
?4
?5
?6
?7
?8
?9

Punctuation

Adlam punctuation is like Spanish in that there are initial and final forms of the question mark and exclamation point, which are placed before and after the questioned or exclaimed clause or phrase.
AdlamLatin
..
⹁,
::
⁏;
? … ؟¿ … ?
! … ?¡ … !

The hyphen is used for word breaks, and there are both parentheses and double parentheses.

Unicode

The Adlam alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2016 with the release of version 9.0. The Unicode block for Adlam is U+1E900–U+1E95F: