Bamum letter Ndaa

It marks the Bamum syllable ndaa.

The sound starts with d after a brief n-like nasal sound, then ends in a long a; ndaa is its Latin transcription. In Bamum text, the sign supplies a syllable within a word.

Some Bamum syllables use two signs together. The documented sequences ꚱꚤ and ꚱꚧ have the Latin transcriptions de and do.

Where did ꚱ come from?

It belongs to Bamum’s later syllabary.

King Ibrahim Njoya and palace collaborators began developing the Bamum script around 1896 to write the Bamum language. Its first form used a large set of logographs—signs for whole words or ideas—as memory aids. Rebus writing, using a sign for a similar-sounding word, helped move the script toward syllable-by-syllable writing.

By 1910, revisions had produced the modern a-ka-u-ku form, named for its first four signs. This syllabary represents syllables with individual signs; ꚱ belongs to this later layer, while older Bamum phases have separate historical characters. The script recorded histories, laws, calendars, and letters, and later became a focus of Bamum cultural revival.

How do I type ꚱ?

Use a Bamum keyboard or character picker.

Keyman lists a Bamum keyboard for desktop, mobile, and web as of 2026. Athinkra offers an online character picker as of 2026; the exact keys depend on the keyboard layout.

If ꚱ appears as a box, your current font may lack the glyph; a Bamum-capable font such as Noto Sans Bamum can display it. A 2023 Unicode update reported uneven rendering of Bamum diacritics on Windows 11; that issue affects marked forms, not ꚱ’s identity.