What ꕖ means
It carries a sound, not a word translation. The syllable is written “mgba” in Vai.
A syllabary is a writing system whose basic signs represent syllables. Vai speakers developed the script in Liberia in the early 1830s, chiefly with Mọmọlu Duwalu Bukẹlẹ and collaborators. By 1834, a school at Jondu taught people to read and write Vai.
The Book of Ndole, an autobiography written before 1849, is the longest surviving early text. Some nineteenth-century manuscripts mixed syllable signs with logograms (whole-word signs), while standardized Vai is mainly syllabic. A 2025 Unicode Core Specification lists Latin, Arabic and Cherokee writing as possible influences.
Part of the collection
Who writes ꕖ
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Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ꕖ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
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How to type or find ꕖ
- Search it as
- vai syllabary · vai writing · vai alphabet · mgba
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.