Adlam Digit Four

It is Adlam’s numeral for four. Adlam took shape in Guinea in the late 1980s, when brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry developed it so Fulani (Fula or Pulaar) could be written more accurately than with Arabic characters.

It spread through community classes and was revised for years; its modern forms settled in 2018. “Adlam” expands its first four letters into a Fulani phrase meaning “the alphabet that protects the peoples from vanishing.” Before June 2016, Adlam could not be typed as Unicode text, so handwritten material circulated as scans. Adlam numbers go right to left; Arabic-script numbers run left to right.