Garay Small Letter Nya

It is the Garay letter for Wolof’s soft “ny” consonant.

It marks one nasal consonant, not a full syllable or word. Garay writes vowels separately, so 𐵿 alone does not spell “nya” or another consonant-and-vowel syllable.

Assane Faye created Garay in Senegal to write Wolof, shaping an alphabet for the language. Its earliest documented publications appeared in January 1961.

How do I type 𐵿?

Use a Garay-aware input method.

Select the Garay consonant for “ny,” then enter the required vowel separately. Latin n + y gives two Latin letters, not this single Garay character.

Garay runs right to left, but its letters do not join. In mixed-script text, a paragraph set to the wrong direction can make parts appear out of order; check the text field’s direction setting before treating the display as a spelling mistake.

Garay is its own script

Faye’s Garay writing appears in primers, mathematics, folktales, maps, social-moral texts, and a Quran with Wolof written between its lines. As of 2024, Garay was documented in women’s groups and adult-literacy work for Mandinka as well as Wolof, and its user community was described as small.

Garay has its own letters. Faye designed it to be approachable to people familiar with Arabic script, but it is not Arabic. In Senegal, Wolof is also written in Latin script and in Wolofal, an Arabic-based way to write Wolof. A similar-sounding Latin ñ belongs to a different writing system.