Bamum Script

Very few writing systems can be traced to one named person. The Bamum script is one of them. Ibrahim Njoya, king (mfon) of the Bamum kingdom in the grasslands of western Cameroon, began devising it in the 1890s so that his people could record their history, customs and laws in their own language rather than in a foreign one.

The first version was a large set of several hundred picture-like signs, each standing for a word or idea. Over the next years Njoya and his scribes simplified it through six stages, A to F, reducing the signs and making the writing more phonetic. The 80-character a-ka-u-ku syllabary took shape by about 1910; Unicode identifies its modern form as Phase G and names it after its first four characters: a ka u ku, ꚠ ꚡ ꚢ ꚣ.

Njoya opened schools in his capital, Foumban, where the script was taught, and the palace produced books, records and letters in it. Under French colonial rule its use declined; Njoya was exiled to Yaoundé in 1931 and died there in 1933. The manuscripts survived in the royal archives in Foumban, and the script has since been taught again to new learners there.

The a-ka-u-ku syllabary: 80 letters, 10 also used as digits

Most Bamum letters represent a syllable, while some represent a single vowel or phoneme: a ꚠ, u ꚢ, ee ꚤ, o ꚧ and i ꚩ are vowels, and m ꚳ is a lone nasal. Related syllables do not share a shape: ma ꛣ, mi ꛎ, mo ꛦ and mu ꚵ look nothing alike, so the letters are learned one by one, in the fixed a-ka-u-ku order shown in the grid.

The last ten letters of the order also serve as the numerals. Unicode files them as letters with number values: mo ꛦ is 1, mbaa ꛧ 2, tet ꛨ 3, kpa ꛩ 4, tèn ꛪ 5, ntuu ꛫ 6, samba ꛬ 7, faamae ꛭ 8, kovuu ꛮ 9 and koghom ꛯ 0. So of the 80 letters, 70 are not used as numerals, while the last ten also serve as numerals.

The names on each letter's page (ka, njaem, kpa, ngkwaen …) are Unicode's Latin transcriptions of the sound or syllable it represents. Some look unusual, like nuae ꚼ or seux ꚹ, because they spell Bamum sounds that English letters do not have.

Bamum marks and punctuation

Two combining marks sit on top of a letter and change how it is read: koqndon ꛰ and tukwentis ꛱. Tukwentis cuts the syllable short, so a letter can be used for its consonant alone. Because they are combining characters, paste them straight after the letter they belong to; on their own they show over a dotted circle or an empty space.

Bamum also has its own punctuation instead of the Latin signs: the full stop ꛳, colon ꛴, comma ꛵, semicolon ꛶ and question mark ꛷, plus a separate sign called njaemli ꛲. When you write Bamum text, use these rather than . : , ; ? so the page stays in one script.

How to type the Bamum script and fix empty boxes

The modern script has its own Unicode block, Bamum, U+A6A0 to U+A6FF, added in Unicode 5.2 in 2009 with 88 characters: the 80 letters, the two marks, njaemli and the five punctuation signs. A second block, Bamum Supplement (U+16800 to U+16A3F, Unicode 6.0, 2010), holds 569 signs from the earlier phases A to F, for scholars working with the old manuscripts.

Windows and macOS do not ship a Bamum keyboard as standard, so the quickest way is to copy from the grid above. In Microsoft Word you can type the code and press Alt+X: a6a0 then Alt+X gives ꚠ. On a Mac, switch to the Unicode Hex Input keyboard, hold Option and type A6A0. In HTML write ꚠ for ꚠ, ꛦ for ꛦ, and so on up to ꛷ for ꛷.

If the letters show as empty boxes, your device has no font with Bamum in it. Google's free Noto Sans Bamum covers both the main block and the supplement; install it, or set it as the font of the text, and the letters appear.

Where the Bamum language is spoken

Bamum (also spelled Bamun or Bamoun, and called Shüpamom by its speakers) is spoken in Cameroon 🇨🇲, around Foumban in the West Region, the old capital of the Bamum kingdom. CLDR estimates about 370,000 speakers. Most of them also use French, and today the language is usually written in Latin letters; the Njoya script lives on in the palace archives, in teaching and as a proud emblem of Bamum history.

Bamum is a Grassfields language, a neighbour of the Bamileke languages; see our pages on Medumba, Ghomala, Yemba and Ngiemboon, and on Basaa, Ewondo and French for the other ways Cameroon writes. For the country itself, with its flag and emoji, see Cameroon. If you like scripts invented by one person, Vai and N'Ko are two more from West Africa.