Vai Script

The Vai script was created in the early 1830s by Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ of Jondu, in what is now Grand Cape Mount County in northwestern Liberia. Bukɛlɛ said the signs were shown to him in a dream. It is one of the few writing systems invented in sub-Saharan Africa that are still in use today, and one of the oldest of them.

Vai communities built educational infrastructure around the script in the 19th century, and by the late 1800s European traders reported that most Vai were literate in it. Today it is learned informally and is used primarily for correspondence and record-keeping. A conference at the University of Liberia in 1962 agreed on a standard set of signs, which is the basis of the chart above and of the Unicode characters on this page.

How the Vai syllabary works: syllables and syllabic signs

Vai is written in a syllabary: short syllables use one sign, while long syllables may be written with two; ꕒ is ba, ꕮ ma and ꕞ la. Unlike an alphabet, or the Ethiopic fidel used for Amharic, the signs that share a consonant or a vowel usually do not share a shape, so ꕒ ba, ꗪ be and ꗃ bo have to be learned one by one. The chart sets each consonant in its own row and the seven vowels in columns, in the order Unicode uses: ꔀ ee, ꔤ i, ꕉ a, ꕱ oo, ꖕ u, ꖺ o, ꗡ e. Unicode spells two pairs of vowels as ee/e and oo/o because Vai has two kinds of e and two kinds of o.

Nasal vowels have signs of their own: ꕉ a but ꕊ an, ꔤ i but ꔥ in. Several Vai consonants that English writes with two letters are single sounds; their consonant-vowel syllables get single signs: the double stops ꕔ kpa and ꕗ gba, the prenasalized ꕓ mba, ꕡ nda and ꕖ mgba, and ꕑ bha, an implosive b made by drawing air in. Two signs stand outside the grid: ꘋ is a syllable of its own, the nasal ng, and ꘌ, the lengthener, stretches the vowel of the syllable before it.

Vai is a tonal language, but the script does not mark tone; readers tell words apart from context. It is written from left to right.

Vai word signs, digits and punctuation ꘍ ꘎ ꘏

Besides syllables, Unicode includes 13 Vai logograms, signs that stand for a whole word rather than a sound: ꘓ feeng, ꘔ keeng, ꘕ ting, ꘖ nii, ꘗ bang, ꘘ faa, ꘙ taa, ꘚ dang, ꘛ doong, ꘜ kung, ꘝ tong, ꘞ do-o and ꘟ jong, named here by their Unicode names. Five more signs, ꘐ fa, ꘑ ka, ꘒ soo, ꘪ ma and ꘫ do, are older alternative forms of syllables that Unicode labels Ndole; they sit in the chart right under the usual sign.

The Vai digits ꘠ ꘡ ꘢ ꘣ ꘤ ꘥ ꘦ ꘧ ꘨ ꘩ work exactly like 0 to 9, place by place, so 2026 is ꘢꘠꘢꘦. Many Vai writers simply use 0 to 9. The script has its own comma ꘍, full stop ꘎ and question mark ꘏, which end clauses, sentences and questions just as , . and ? do.

How to type the Vai script and which fonts show it

Vai has been part of Unicode since version 5.1 in 2008, in the block U+A500 to U+A63F, so these characters are real text: they paste into documents, chats and social media, and search engines can read them. Most computers and phones do not come with a Vai keyboard, so copying from this page is the quickest way to write a word or a name. Tap a sign to copy it, or copy several in a row and paste them together.

In Microsoft Word, type a code and press Alt+X: A549 Alt+X gives ꕉ, A559 gives ꕙ. In HTML, write the number, e.g. ꕉ for ꕉ. To see the signs you need a font that has them: Noto Sans Vai is free, and Windows includes Ebrima. If you see empty boxes instead of ꕙ ꔤ, your device is missing such a font.

Where the Vai language is spoken

Vai is a Mande language. CLDR estimates around 200,000 speakers in Liberia 🇱🇷, most of them in Grand Cape Mount County along the Atlantic coast, around Robertsport and Lake Piso, and in neighbouring Bomi County. Vai communities also live across the border in Sierra Leone 🇸🇱, and its closest relative is Kono, spoken in Sierra Leone. Liberia's currency is the Liberian dollar, written with the ordinary dollar sign $ (L$ when it needs to be told apart from the US dollar, which also circulates there).

Liberia is home to many languages: see the collections for Kpelle, the most widely spoken, Bassa, Mende (also Mande, mainly in Sierra Leone), Liberian English and Krio, and the country pages for Liberia and Sierra Leone. Another West African script made for Mande languages, N'Ko, was invented in Guinea in 1949 and has its own collection.