Zaghawa Language Alphabet

Zaghawa is the language of the Zaghawa people, whose homeland, often called Dar Zaghawa (دار زغاوة), runs across the border between north-western Sudan and eastern Chad, on the dry edge of the Sahara. Zaghawa is the name the language has in Arabic (زغاوة) and in most books; its speakers call themselves the Beri and their language Beria, which is why linguists increasingly write "Beria" too. Its language code is zag.

CLDR, the Unicode project's language database, estimates about 260,000 speakers and counts them in Sudan 🇸🇩, mainly in North Darfur. That figure leaves out the many Zaghawa across the border in eastern Chad 🇹🇩, where the language is spoken around Iriba and Bahai in the Wadi Fira and Ennedi regions, and the Zaghawa families displaced by the Darfur war live on both sides of the border. Treat every number as a rough estimate.

Zaghawa belongs to the Saharan branch of the Nilo-Saharan languages. Its relatives are Kanuri and Kanembu around Lake Chad and Teda and Dazaga in the Tibesti and Borkou, not Arabic, although Islam and trade have brought in many Arabic words and many Zaghawa also speak Sudanese or Chadian Arabic. Darfur's other languages, Fur and Masalit, have their own collections, as do Arabic, Sudanese Arabic, French, Sudan and Chad.

Zaghawa language alphabet: Latin letters with no fixed spelling

Zaghawa is above all a spoken language, and it has no standardized orthography. Literacy materials, word lists and linguists' grammars use Latin letters, but spellings vary and some conventions use diacritics. The grid shows basic Latin A–Z in capital and small form, not a definitive list of Zaghawa letters.

Like the other Saharan languages, Zaghawa uses pitch, or tone, to tell words apart, and it has sounds such as the ng of English sing that plain A–Z does not show directly. Some writers use a macron over a vowel to mark the advanced-tongue-root (vowel-harmony) distinctions, and tone is sometimes marked with diacritics, though conventions vary. If you need the phonetic symbols, ŋ is in our Masalit and Fur collections.

In Sudan, where school runs in Arabic, some Zaghawa speakers also write their language informally in the Arabic script; in Chad, French and Arabic are the languages of school, so both scripts appear. The Arabic letters are in the Arabic and Sudanese Arabic collections.

Beria Erfe, the Zaghawa script made from camel brands

When people search for the "Zaghawa alphabet", they usually mean Beria Erfe, an alphabet of the Zaghawa's own. Zaghawa clans have long marked their camels and other livestock with brands, each clan with its own sign, and the script's Zaghawa creators took the shapes of these brands as the starting point for letters, so that it grew out of marks every herder already knew.

Beria Erfe was added to the Unicode Standard in version 17.0, published in 2025, so it now has its own code points like any other script. Because it is so new, many phones and computers may not display it yet: you need a font that covers it, such as SIL's Kedebideri, and a keyboard or input tool for it. Some Zaghawa text online is written in Beria Erfe, as well as in Latin or Arabic letters.

How to type the Zaghawa alphabet and quotes

Standard Latin keyboards provide basic letters, but some Zaghawa spellings use macrons and accents. The curly quotes are another matter. Windows: hold Alt and type on the number pad 0147 for “, 0148 for ”, 0145 for ‘, 0146 for ’, 0171 for «, and 0187 for ». Mac: Option + [ gives “, Option + Shift + [ gives ”, Option + ] and Option + Shift + ] give ‘ and ’, Option + \ and Option + Shift + \ give « and ».

iPhone and Android: hold the quote key to pick “ ” ‘ ’ « ». Writers schooled in French, as many in Chad are, use « » with a space inside, « comme ceci », while those schooled in English use “ ”.

HTML: the characters work as they are in UTF-8. Add lang="zag" to the element so search engines and screen readers know the text is Zaghawa, and use “ ” « and » when a page cannot hold the characters themselves.

Zaghawa emoji: camels, herds and the desert edge

The emoji in this collection are the ones that belong to Zaghawa life. 🐪 comes first: the Zaghawa are camel herders, the clan brands behind Beria Erfe were burned on camels, and the camel stands for the whole Sahelian way of life of Dar Zaghawa. 🐄, 🐐 and 🐑 are the cattle, goats and sheep that families keep alongside them, moving with water and grazing through the seasons.

🏜️ is the dry, sandy country on the southern edge of the Sahara that the Zaghawa homeland lies in, and 🕌 the Islam the Zaghawa follow, with Ramadan and Eid greetings in Arabic. The flags 🇸🇩 and 🇹🇩 mark the two countries the homeland spans; for each country's own emoji, see the Sudan and Chad collections.

Sudan's pound uses SDG as its CLDR symbol in Latin text and ج.س. in Arabic. Chad uses the Central African CFA franc, whose CLDR symbol is FCFA and whose ISO code is XAF.