Fula Alphabet (Fulani)

Fula (Fulah) is a macrolanguage of related varieties with several regional names: Pulaar in Senegal, Mauritania and The Gambia, Pular in the Futa Jallon highlands of Guinea, Fulfulde from Mali and Burkina Faso to Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon, Peul in French and Fulani, the Hausa name, in much of English. One speaker is a Pullo, the people are the Fulɓe.

The Latin alphabet in Unicode's CLDR has 27 letters in this order: A B Ɓ C D Ɗ E F G H I J K L M N Ñ Ŋ O P R S T U W Y Ƴ. The core set omits q, v, x and z, which CLDR lists as auxiliary characters; the five additional letters are Ɓ ɓ, Ɗ ɗ and Ƴ ƴ after b, d and y, and Ñ ñ and Ŋ ŋ after n. The apostrophe is used as a letter too. Spelling is regular: c is the ch of church, j the j of jam, g is always hard, a long vowel is written twice (Pulaar, Fulfulde) and so is a long consonant (Pullo). The nasal clusters mb, nd, ng and nj start many words, as in ndiyam, water.

What Ɓ ɓ, Ɗ ɗ, Ƴ ƴ, Ñ ñ, Ŋ ŋ and the apostrophe do

Ɓ and Ɗ are implosives: b and d are made while the voice box drops and air is drawn briefly inward. Ƴ represents a glottal stop with a y-like quality, not an implosive. They tell words apart, which is why they need their own letters: the plural Fulɓe has ɓ, the number ɗiɗi, two, has ɗ twice, and Mi yiɗi ma, I love you, has it once. Ñ ñ is the ny of canyon, as in Jam ñalli?, the afternoon greeting, and Ŋ ŋ is the ng of English sing.

The apostrophe marks a glottal stop, the catch in the middle of English uh-oh: go'o, one, na'i, cattle, and Haalpulaar'en, the people who speak Pulaar. Typed text usually has the plain ' or the curly ’; the letter apostrophe ʼ (U+02BC) is the same mark as Unicode means it for languages that use it as a letter, so spell checkers and double-click selection keep the word whole.

Spelling differs a little between countries. In Mali, as in Bambara, the ñ sound is usually written Ɲ ɲ, so both are in the grid. In Nigeria, following Hausa practice, ƴ is commonly written 'y. Watch out for look-alikes: Ɗ is not Đ (D with stroke) or the Icelandic Ð, ŋ is not the Greek eta η, and Ɲ ɲ (hook on the left) is not ɳ.

How to type Fula letters: ɓ, ɗ, ƴ, ñ and ŋ on a keyboard

On a phone, add a keyboard app that supports Fula, Pulaar or Fulfulde, or a West African layout; they put ɓ, ɗ, ƴ, ñ and ŋ under long-press of b, d, y and n or on keys of their own. Plain ñ is under long-press of n on the standard keyboards of Android and iPhone. Otherwise copy the letters from the grid above.

On Windows, ñ is Alt+164 and Ñ Alt+165 on the number pad, or AltGr+n on the US-International layout; on a Mac, press Option+N and then n. For the hooked letters in Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 0253 gives ɓ, 0181 Ɓ, 0257 ɗ, 018A Ɗ, 01B4 ƴ, 01B3 Ƴ, 014B ŋ and 014A Ŋ. To type them in every program, install a free Fula keyboard layout, for example through Keyman, or on a Mac switch to the Unicode Hex Input layout and hold Option while typing the same codes.

In HTML, write ɓ for ɓ, Ɓ for Ɓ, ɗ for ɗ, Ɗ for Ɗ, ƴ for ƴ, Ƴ for Ƴ, ñ for ñ, Ñ for Ñ, ŋ for ŋ and Ŋ for Ŋ.

Adlam: the Fula alphabet of its own

In 1989 two brothers in Guinea, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry, still schoolboys, invented a script made for Fula. Its name, ADLaM, comes from its first four letters, Alif 𞤀, Daali 𞤁, Laam 𞤂 and Miim 𞤃, the initials of Alkule Dandaydhe Leñol Mulugol, "the alphabet that protects the peoples from vanishing". It spread from hand-copied notebooks to schools, newspapers and phones, and entered Unicode in version 9.0 in 2016.

Adlam runs right to left like Arabic, but unlike most scripts of Africa and the Middle East it has capital and small letters. Unicode encodes 34 letter pairs; Fula's own sounds each have one, so Bhe 𞤩 is ɓ, Dha 𞤯 is ɗ, Yhe 𞤰 is ƴ, Nya 𞤻 is ñ and Nha 𞤽 is ŋ, and the last six letters write sounds from other languages. It has its own digits, 𞥐𞥑𞥒𞥓𞥔𞥕𞥖𞥗𞥘𞥙, marks that lengthen vowels and double consonants, and question and exclamation marks, 𞥟 and 𞥞, that open the sentence the way Spanish ¿ and ¡ do.

Modern Windows, Android and iPhone systems can display Adlam, and Adlam keyboards are available for computers and phones; where letters appear as boxes, a font such as Noto Sans Adlam fixes it. Fula has also been written for centuries in Arabic letters, called Ajami, in the scholarly centres of the Futa Jallon and of the Sokoto Caliphate.

Where Fula is spoken

Fula is spoken across the Sahel and the savanna from Senegal 🇸🇳 to Cameroon 🇨🇲 and beyond. Unicode's CLDR counts about 9 million speakers under the code ff, mostly in Senegal (about 4 million), Guinea (about 3.6 million), Cameroon (about 1.1 million) and Mauritania (about a quarter of a million). It lists the big eastern varieties separately: Nigerian Fulfulde with about 16 million speakers 🇳🇬, Central-Eastern Niger Fulfulde with about 1.8 million 🇳🇪 and Maasina Fulfulde with about 1.7 million in Mali 🇲🇱. Together that is about 28 million by these estimates, before counting Burkina Faso 🇧🇫, Guinea-Bissau 🇬🇼, The Gambia 🇬🇲 and the herding communities further east.

Pulaar is a national language of Senegal and Mauritania, and Pular is one of the main languages of Guinea, next to French. Prices there are written with letters: F CFA, FG for the Guinean franc, UM for the ouguiya; only Nigeria's naira has a sign, ₦. Fula's closest relative is Serer, and Wolof belongs to the same Atlantic family in Senegal; Hausa, Bambara and the Senegal, Guinea, Cameroon and Mauritania collections each have their own page, as do Nigerian Fulfulde, Central-Eastern Niger Fulfulde and Maasina Fulfulde.