Dyula Alphabet (Dioula, Jula)

Dyula, also spelled Dioula or Jula and called Julakan by its speakers, is written in the Latin alphabet in Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire. Its letters are almost the same as those of Bambara, its close Manding relative in Mali; the Burkina Faso alphabet also includes V: A B C D E Ɛ F G H I J K L M N Ɲ Ŋ O Ɔ P R S T U V W Y Z, each with a capital and a small form. The four added letters sit next to the plain letter they look like: ɛ straight after e, ɲ and ŋ straight after n, and ɔ straight after o. Q and X turn up in French names and loanwords, not in the Dyula alphabet itself.

The plain letters are read the same way every time. C is the ch of church, as in I ni ce (hello, thank you), j is the j of jam, g is always hard and r is a quick tap of the tongue. A long vowel is written twice, as in baara (work) and naani (four), and a nasal vowel is written with an n after it, as in Julakan itself.

What Ɛ ɛ, Ɔ ɔ, Ɲ ɲ and Ŋ ŋ do in Dioula

Dyula has seven vowels and the Latin alphabet only five letters for them. The open e, Ɛ ɛ, is close to the vowel of English bed, while plain e is the closed é of French; the open o, Ɔ ɔ, is close to the vowel of British law, while plain o is the closed ô of French. You meet them in almost every sentence: bɛ and tɛ are "is" and "is not", kɛnɛ is well or healthy, and sɔgɔma (morning) and tɔgɔ (name) are full of ɔ.

Ɲ ɲ is a single sound, the ny of canyon or the gn of French montagne, and Ŋ ŋ is the ng of English sing. Many people, especially on phones, still write è and ò for the open vowels, or just e, o and ny, because their keyboard has nothing else; that is understood in a chat, but books, signs, names and anything you want found by search use the real letters.

Dyula is a tonal language: high and low tones can tell words apart, but everyday spelling leaves them unmarked, so you will only see accents such as à or á in dictionaries and learning material. Mind the look-alikes: Ɛ is not the Greek epsilon ε, Ɔ is not the reversed c ↄ, and Ɲ ɲ has its hook on the left, unlike the phonetic ɳ.

How to type Dyula letters ɛ, ɔ, ɲ and ŋ

On a phone, add a keyboard app that supports Dyula, Bambara or another West African language; Gboard on Android, for example, has a Bambara layout, and such layouts usually put ɛ, ɔ, ɲ and ŋ under a long-press of e, o and n or on keys of their own. Otherwise copy them from the grid above.

In Microsoft Word on Windows, type the code and press Alt+X: 025B gives ɛ, 0190 Ɛ, 0254 ɔ, 0186 Ɔ, 0272 ɲ, 019D Ɲ, 014B ŋ and 014A Ŋ. To type them in every program, install a free keyboard layout for the Manding languages or for the languages of Burkina Faso or Côte d'Ivoire, for example through Keyman. On a Mac, switch to the Unicode Hex Input layout and hold Option while typing the same four-digit codes.

In HTML, write ɛ for ɛ, Ɛ for Ɛ, ɔ for ɔ, Ɔ for Ɔ, ɲ for ɲ, Ɲ for Ɲ, and ŋ or ŋ for ŋ, Ŋ or Ŋ for Ŋ. Current system fonts generally show all eight; decorative fonts often lack some of them, so check that a letter does not fall back to a different font.

Apostrophes, quotes and prices in Dyula

The apostrophe ’ is part of ordinary Dyula spelling, because short words run together and drop a vowel: bɛ a becomes b’a, ni a becomes n’a, and N b’a fɛ means I want it. Printed Dioula in Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire follows French typography, so a quotation sits in guillemets: « I ni ce ».

Both countries pay in West African CFA francs, which have no currency sign of their own; prices are written as letters after the amount, 2 000 F CFA or 2 000 FCFA, so there is no currency symbol in the grid.

Where Dyula is spoken

Dyula is the great trade language of western Burkina Faso 🇧🇫, centred on Bobo-Dioulasso, and is heard in markets all over the country, Ouagadougou included; Unicode's CLDR estimates about 7 million speakers there, many of whom speak it as a second language next to their own mother tongue. In Côte d'Ivoire 🇨🇮 Dioula is the market language of the north and of traders across the country, Abidjan included, so the real number of people who use it is larger still.

The name itself means trader: the jula were Muslim merchants who carried kola nuts, gold and cloth along the routes between the forest and the Sahel, and their language spread with them. Dyula belongs to the Manding group of the Mande languages, and its speakers understand much of Bambara in Mali and Mandingo in Guinea and The Gambia; both have their own collections, as does N’Ko, the right-to-left script Solomana Kanté created in 1949 for all the Manding languages and used for Dyula too. In Burkina Faso Dyula lives next to Mossi (Mooré), Fula and French, and in Côte d'Ivoire next to Baoulé, Cebaara Senoufo and French; the Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire collections gather each country's flag and emoji.