Bassa Vah Alphabet

Bassa Vah is a true alphabet: consonants and vowels each have their own letter, and it is written from left to right. Unicode encodes 30 letters, 23 consonants and 7 vowels, in its Bassa Vah block (U+16AD0–U+16AFF), which arrived with Unicode 7.0 in 2014. The consonants run from Enni 𖫐 and Ka 𖫑 to Wadda 𖫦; the vowels are A 𖫧, O 𖫨, Oo 𖫩, U 𖫪, Ee 𖫫, E 𖫬 and I 𖫭.

The letter names are a better guide than English spelling. Oo writes a close o and O the open ɔ of British law; Ee is a close e, as in Spanish mesa, and E the open ɛ of bed. Kpah and Gbu stand for the West African sounds kp and gb, made with the back of the tongue and the lips closing at once, sounds English has no letter for. Mbe usually represents implosive ɓ before an oral vowel and m before a nasalized one; Do represents implosive ɗ initially and [ɾ] or [ɺ] medially in some contexts.

Enni 𖫐 represents /n/ in some positions and marks a preceding vowel as nasalized in syllable-final position. For a common consonant-initial syllable, type the consonant, vowel and tone mark, adding Enni when the vowel is nasalized: 𖫛𖫨𖫰𖫐 is Wa, the open vowel O, the high-tone mark and Enni, a high-toned nasalized wɔ.

The five tone marks: tone inside the vowel

Bassa is a tonal language: the pitch of a syllable can change which word it is, so Bassa Vah writes tone on every vowel. It has five marks, high 𖫰, low 𖫱, mid 𖫲, low-mid 𖫳 and high-low 𖫴; the last two are gliding tones, rising and falling. What makes them special is where they go: each is drawn inside the open centre of the vowel letter, not above or beside it.

In the text itself the mark is a separate combining character typed after the vowel, so A with a high tone is 𖫧 followed by 𖫰: 𖫧𖫰. Copied alone, a mark shows over a dotted circle or looks empty, because it has no vowel to sit in. The alphabet's own full stop 𖫵 ends a sentence the way a period does in English.

How to type Bassa Vah: keyboard, font and Unicode

The simplest way is to copy the letters and marks from this page. For regular writing, a Bassa Vah keyboard layout lets you type each letter from its own key, vowel first and tone mark after it, in the same order Unicode stores them.

The font is the real hurdle. Android 10 includes Noto Sans Bassa Vah in its system font list; systems or apps without a supporting font may show empty boxes. Google's free Noto Sans Bassa Vah covers the whole block and places the tone marks inside the vowels; install it, or load it on a web page, and the script displays properly.

Every letter also has a code point. In Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 16AE7 gives A, 16AF0 the high-tone mark, 16AF5 the full stop. In HTML write 𖫧 and so on. On a Mac, open the Character Viewer with Control+Command+Space and search for Bassa Vah.

Bassa in Latin letters: Ɓ ɓ, Ɛ ɛ and Ɔ ɔ

Bassa is usually written in the Latin alphabet, which needs four letters beyond A–Z: Ɓ ɓ (b with hook), Ɖ ɖ (African D and d with tail), Ɛ ɛ (open e) and Ɔ ɔ (open o). Ɓ is implosive b; Ɖ is the Latin orthographic counterpart of Bassa Vah Do; Ɛ and Ɔ are the open vowels that Bassa Vah writes as E and O. Writing plain b, e or o instead is a spelling mistake, not a style choice. Tone may be marked with accents over the vowels, above all in teaching materials and dictionaries.

On Windows, in Word type 0253 then Alt+X for ɓ and 0181 for Ɓ, 0256 for ɖ and 0189 for Ɖ, 025B for ɛ, 0190 for Ɛ, 0254 for ɔ and 0186 for Ɔ. In HTML they are ɓ, Ɓ, ɖ, Ɖ, ɛ, Ɛ, ɔ and Ɔ. On a phone, an IPA or African-languages keyboard offers these letters, or you can copy them from this page.

Watch the look-alikes: ɛ is not the Greek ε and ɔ is not the reversed ↄ; text typed with a look-alike looks right but breaks search and sorting.

Where the Bassa language is spoken, and where Vah came from

Bassa is a Kru language of Liberia, spoken above all in Grand Bassa County around the port city of Buchanan, in the neighbouring counties and in Monrovia; CLDR estimates about 760,000 speakers, which puts it among the largest languages of Liberia after Kpelle. Its relatives are the other Kru languages, such as Grebo, Krahn and Klao. Do not confuse it with Basaa (Bassa) of Cameroon, a Bantu language written in Latin letters with a collection of its own, or with Basa of Nigeria.

Vah is usually glossed as “to throw a sign”. Bassa tradition tells of messages chewed into leaves or cut into trees and left for others to read, some said to have warned of slave traders. The modern alphabet was taught and printed by Dr Thomas Flo Lewis, a Bassa man who said he had learned it from Bassa descendants in the Americas; he had Bassa Vah texts and primers printed in Syracuse and in Dresden, Germany, from the 1900s into the 1930s, and the Bassa Vah Association has promoted it since 1959. How old the script really is remains debated.

Liberia is home to more than one African script: the Vai syllabary of the 1830s is the best known, and the Kpelle have a script of their own as well. For their letters see the Vai and Kpelle collections; for everyday Liberian writing see Liberian English, and for the flag, the Liberian dollar and the country's emoji see Liberia.