What 𞤦 means
It is the lowercase Adlam letter for the /b/ sound.
Adlam was devised in Guinea in 1989 by brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry, then schoolboys who found Arabic script a poor fit for Fulfulde, the Fulani language — and Latin spelling missed sounds too. It spread through handwritten textbooks and classes into schools.
Adlam runs right to left; Unicode 17.0 lets fonts draw the letters separate or cursively joined — a style choice, not a different meaning.
how do I type 𞤦?
Use an Adlam keyboard layout, or type its code point where that is supported.
On desktop, enable an Adlam layout and ba sits on a normal key. As of 2026, Keyman's Basic Adlam layout covers phones too; extra letters hide behind a long press on marked keys.
In Word on Windows, typing 1E926 then AltX also produces the letter where an Adlam font is active.
why does 𞤦 look different?
Different fonts can draw the same letter differently.
Unicode font comparisons for 2016–2024 recorded Adlam redraws aimed at legibility. Small ba and small qaaf also came up as confusable in some designs — judge the letter by its word, not its outline.
The capital partner is 𞤄. Arabic ب is a relative, not a twin: Fulfulde was earlier written in Ajami — the language set in Arabic letters — where ب carried /b/.
Neutral — an everyday working letter in Fulfulde text; tone comes from the words it spells.
Do not call it Arabic ب: Adlam is a separate alphabet, even though both run right to left.
Part of the collection
Who writes 𞤦
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Don't confuse it with
1Related characters
3
Worth knowing
- ADLaM is named for its first four letters — alif, daali, laam, miim — read as 'the alphabet that protects a people from vanishing.'
Questions people ask
3Is 𞤦 an emoji?
No. It is a text letter in the Adlam alphabet; it only renders where an Adlam-capable font is installed.
Why is it called ba and not b?
Ba is simply the letter's name. Adlam names letters after their sounds, in the Arabic tradition of bāʾ.
Why does 𞤦 show as a box?
Your font lacks Adlam — without an Adlam-capable font the system draws a placeholder box; installing Ebrima or Noto Sans Adlam fixes it.
More like this
10
How to type or find 𞤦
- Also called
- Adlam ba · Adlam b
- Search it as
- ba · b · fulani · fulfulde · pular · ajami · adlam alphabet · adlam letters
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𞤦\1E926Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.