Garay & Medefaidrin Scripts

Garay (𐵹𐵊𐵾𐵊𐵼) is an alphabet for Wolof, the most widely spoken language of Senegal, created by Assane Faye and published in January 1961. It runs from right to left in horizontal lines with spaces between words, the letters stand apart and never join as Arabic letters do, and the consonants come in two cases: a capital is the small letter with a swash added to one side, as in 𐵐 𐵰 a, 𐵑 𐵱 c and 𐵒 𐵲 m. A sentence begins with a capital and so does a personal name; the encoding proposal transcribes the inventor's own signature as 𐵐𐵊𐵸𐵊𐶁 𐶀𐵊𐵼, Asan fay. Faye designed the script to feel familiar to anyone who had learned some Arabic script, the script of Qur'anic schools across Senegal, while being simpler to learn.

There are nineteen consonant letters plus 𐵐 𐵰 a, a vowel carrier that works like the Arabic alif at the start of a word that begins with a vowel. In the order above they are 𐵱 c, 𐵲 m, 𐵳 k, 𐵴 b, 𐵵 j, 𐵶 s, 𐵷 w, 𐵸 l, 𐵹 g, 𐵺 d, 𐵻 x (the rough kh of Wolof xam, to know), 𐵼 y, 𐵽 t, 𐵾 r, 𐵿 ñ (the ny of Spanish señor), 𐶀 f, 𐶁 n, 𐶂 p, and 𐶃 h for the Arabic ħ of loanwords. That order is not arbitrary: every letter from a to p also stands for a number, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, then 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100, and the alphabet is recited by rising value, the way Hebrew and Arabic letters once counted. The modern 𐵓 k and 𐵡 n are written with two teeth; 𐵤 𐶄 and 𐵥 𐶅, the three-toothed old k and old n, were encoded so that Faye's early manuscripts can be typed exactly as written.

Wolof has no tones, so Garay needs no tone marks, which keeps a word short. Its handwriting does have one flourish: the tail of the last letter of a word often swings back underneath it, sometimes underlining the whole word. The swash means nothing and is left to the font. Our Wolof Alphabet collection has the official Latin spelling of the language, in which almost all Wolof is printed; Garay is the script a devoted minority learned from Faye himself.

How Garay writes vowels, long sounds, double consonants and numbers

Vowels are not full letters. Five vowel characters, typed after the consonant, cover the nine vowel sounds of Wolof: 𐵊 a, 𐵋 i, 𐵌 o (the open ɔ of Wolof xol, heart), the combining mark 𐵩 e (the open ɛ) and the small squiggle 𐵍 ee, which mostly appears in pairs: 𐵍𐵊 is ë (the schwa), 𐵍𐵋 ih, 𐵍𐵌 u, 𐵩𐵍 é (the closed e) and 𐵌𐵍 ó (the closed o). A vowel is made long by adding 𐵎 after it, so 𐵳𐵊 is ka and 𐵳𐵊𐵎 kaa. Vowels have no capitals; a word that begins with a vowel starts with the carrier 𐵰 or 𐵐 and the vowel sign follows it. 𐵏, the sukun that marked a consonant with no vowel after it, was borrowed from Arabic and is now obsolete, but older books use it, so it is encoded.

The mark 𐵩 has a second job. Wolof has four prenasalized stops, mb, nd, nj and ng, and Garay writes them as b, d, j and g with 𐵩 above: 𐵴𐵩 is mb. Because the same mark would then be ambiguous, the vowel ɛ after such a letter is written with the spacing squiggle instead, 𐵴𐵩𐵍 mbɛ against 𐵳𐵩 kɛ, and e becomes 𐵴𐵩𐵍𐵍 against 𐵳𐵩𐵍. The velar nasal ŋ is 𐵹𐵫, g with a dot above; the dot and the double dot 𐵬 also adapt Arabic sounds, 𐵶𐵫 for ṣ and 𐵶𐵬 for z. A doubled consonant, which Wolof uses constantly, takes 𐵪 above the letter: 𐵳𐵪 kk. 𐵭 nasalizes a sound in a foreign word. All of these are combining marks: type the letter, then the mark.

Garay digits 𐵀 𐵁 𐵂 𐵃 𐵄 𐵅 𐵆 𐵇 𐵈 𐵉 are decimal and behave exactly like the digits in Arabic text: inside a right-to-left line a number still has its highest place on the left, so 30 is 𐵃𐵀. Faye wrote a secondary-school course in modern mathematics in Garay in 1982, and from it come the slanted 𐶎 plus and 𐶏 minus; the capital 𐵜 y doubled as his multiplication sign. Punctuation is a mix of Latin and Arabic: the full stop, colon, exclamation mark and ellipsis, the Arabic comma and semicolon, either question mark. Two marks are Garay's own: 𐵮, a hyphen used only when a word is split at the end of a line, and 𐵯, the reduplication mark, which repeats the word before it, so yukki followed by 𐵯 reads yukki yukki, to jog.

Assane Faye and who writes Garay today

El Hadj Assane Faye of Senegal wanted an African script for an African language at the moment of independence; he said the alphabet was made to marry African sociolinguistic characteristics. In the sixty years that followed he wrote out a whole small library by hand: primers for each letter that set the Garay form beside its Latin and Arabic counterparts, the maths course, books of folktales, maps with place names in Garay, and a Qur'an with an interlinear Wolof translation in his script. Digitized pages of these manuscripts are kept online by the Cataloging Africana project. The linguist David Dalby described the alphabet in 1966 in a paper on the new West African scripts for Manding, Wolof and Fula; the older invented scripts of the region have pages of their own here, the Bamum Script, the Vai Script and the Mende Alphabet & Kikakui Script.

The script was taught informally, in women's groups and adult literacy classes for Wolof and Mandinka speakers, and the 2016 encoding proposal put the user community at about two hundred people in Senegal and the Gambia, kept together by a teachers' association, the Movement of Teachers of African Languages in Senegal. Faye's son Abdou Souleye Faye provided the handwritten samples and the modern spelling rules for the 2022 proposal, so the encoded script reflects how the family writes it now. The road into Unicode was long: Anshuman Pandey introduced the alphabet to the committee in 2011, Michael Everson proposed it in 2012 and 2016, Andrij Rovenchak, Abdou Souleye Faye and Charles Riley revised the model in 2022, and Garay appeared in Unicode 16.0 on 10 September 2024 at U+10D40 to U+10D8F, 69 characters. Its ISO 15924 code is Gara.

The Medefaidrin script of the Oberi Okaime church

Medefaidrin is both a language and an alphabet, and both were made by one congregation. The Oberi Okaime church, whose name means "church freely given", grew up among the Ibibio people near Itu on the western bank of the Cross River, in what is now Akwa Ibom State in south-eastern Nigeria. Its tradition holds that in 1927 the Holy Spirit revealed a spirit language to the church's founder, Bishop Aikeld Ukpong (Michael Ukpong), on a spiritual board that only the initiated could see; since he could not read or write, the group's secretary, Prophet Jakeld Udofia (Akpan Akpan Udofia), transcribed what was revealed and devised the letters, since Ibibio itself had no script. The language was settled by 1936. That year the church opened a school to teach children in Medefaidrin, and the British colonial administration closed it within the year. The language lived on in services, hymns, letters and written contracts between members, faded, and was revived from 1986 when Udofia began teaching it again in the Sunday school at Ididep. The church counts about 4,000 members today, fewer than twenty adults speak the language and perhaps five read and write the script fluently, which is why the linguists Dafydd Gibbon, Moses Ekpenyong and Eno-Abasi Urua documented it and, with Andrij Rovenchak, proposed it for encoding.

The script is an alphabet written left to right, with capital and small letters on the English pattern, 32 of each. Their shapes were invented and do not resemble Latin letters, though the system does: there are letters for digraph sounds and the letters are read as written. The traditional charts, from R. F. G. Adams's 1947 article to the church's own teaching sheets, present them in four rows, which is the order above: 𖹀 m, 𖹁 s, 𖹂 v, 𖹃 w, 𖹄 atiu, 𖹅 z, 𖹆 kp, 𖹇 p; 𖹈 t, 𖹉 g, 𖹊 f, 𖹋 i, 𖹌 k, 𖹍 a, 𖹎 j, 𖹏 e; 𖹐 b, 𖹑 c (said s), 𖹒 u, 𖹓 yu, 𖹔 l, 𖹕 q (said kw), 𖹖 hp (the h), 𖹗 ny (the ŋ); 𖹘 x, 𖹙 d, 𖹚 oe (the open o), 𖹛 n, 𖹜 r, 𖹝 o, 𖹞 ai, 𖹟 y. The church's reader, Rev. Richmael Ekit, gave the proposal the letters' names, mme, ses, vey, krayu, atiu, ze, kpi, pik, te, gee, fe, i, kai, a, ja, e, be, sii, u, yu, li, kwoo, heg, ning, eksi, de, o, nen, ri, oo, aii, ya. The oddest letter is 𖹄 𖹤 atiu: it is the pronoun "I", a whole word with its own character, and its capital and small forms differ slightly in meaning. The church's name in its own script is 𖹝𖹰𖹯𖹼𖹫 𖹚𖹬𖹾𖹠𖹯, Obɛri Ɔkaimɛ.

The language itself is a curiosity of the same order. Its grammar largely follows English, its meanings follow Ibibio, and its vocabulary mostly follows neither: the definite article is dei, and the prepositions su "to", fra "from", nai "by" and kin "in" echo their English equivalents, while most words were made new. It is stressed rather than toned, which sets it apart from Ibibio, and it allows consonant clusters that neither English nor Ibibio has. Its calendar has sixteen months of four weeks each.

Medefaidrin numbers in base 20, and how to show and type both scripts

Medefaidrin counts in twenties, as Ibibio does, so it needs twenty digits: 𖺀 𖺁 𖺂 𖺃 𖺄 𖺅 𖺆 𖺇 𖺈 𖺉 for 0 to 9 and 𖺊 𖺋 𖺌 𖺍 𖺎 𖺏 𖺐 𖺑 𖺒 𖺓 for 10 to 19, each a single character. Numbers from 20 up are positional in base 20, and the higher places are usually written with simplified forms of 1, 2 and 3: 𖺔𖺀 is 20, 𖺕𖺀 40, 𖺕𖺁 41, 𖺕𖺏 55, 𖺖𖺀 60, 𖺄𖺀 80, 𖺄𖺊 90, 𖺅𖺀 100, 𖺊𖺀 200 and 𖺔𖺀𖺀 400. The simplified shapes are not compulsory; a 2016 sample written by the community uses the ordinary digits there too. Zero is drawn with a full crossbar, like a theta. Unicode classes these as numeric symbols rather than decimal digits, so spreadsheets will not add them up. The script's own punctuation is the comma 𖺗 and full stop 𖺘, the symbol 𖺙 aiva for "or", and 𖺚, an exclamation that marks someone being addressed.

Showing these scripts is the practical problem. Medefaidrin is the easy one: Google's free Noto Sans Medefaidrin, on Google Fonts since 2020 in weights from regular to bold, covers all 91 characters, and once it is installed every character on this page displays in any modern app. Garay is the hard one: as of October 2026 there is no Noto font for it, BabelStone's list of fonts for new blocks shows none, and the only complete font is the one Andrij Rovenchak drew for the Unicode code charts. On most phones and computers Garay text therefore shows as empty boxes. The characters are still real and will travel intact through a message or a document; they simply wait for a font, as Osage and Adlam once did. Our Osage Alphabet page tells how quickly that can change once a community's font arrives.

Neither script has a standard keyboard layout in Windows, macOS, Android or iOS, so this page is the practical way to type them: copy the letters, then add the Garay vowel signs and marks after the consonant they belong to, and let the text engine place them, since Garay runs right to left and its digits left to right by themselves. In Microsoft Word you can also type a code and press Alt+X: 10D50 gives 𐵐, 10D70 gives 𐵰, 16E40 gives 𖹀 and 16E64 gives 𖹤. For a research paper give the Unicode text together with a Latin transcription, and name the proposals when you cite the encoding. Other African scripts of the same spirit, invented for one people and now encoded, have their own pages here: the N'Ko Alphabet, the Bassa Vah Alphabet and the Amazigh Alphabet (Tifinagh).