Vai syllable nja

It writes one Vai syllable, conventionally transliterated nja.

Vai is a syllabary: each character usually represents a syllable rather than a single letter. The Latin-letter form nja labels this Vai syllable; it is not how Vai text is written.

Vai began in Liberia in the early 1830s, developed mainly by Mọmọlu Duwalu Bukẹlẹ of Jondu, who later said a dream inspired him; a missionary report from 1836 already describes a Vai man writing it. Standardization efforts followed in 1899 and at a 1962 conference. The Unicode repertoire draws on the 1962 standard, Momolu Massaquoi’s 1911 additions, modern primers and texts, and The Book of Ndole, an early manuscript and the longest surviving text from Vai’s first period. Older writing also used meaning-bearing logograms. Latin, Arabic, and possibly Cherokee influence—and the possibility that Bukẹlẹ regularized earlier pictographs—remain hypotheses about the script, not a basis for treating ꕨ as another script’s sign.

How do I type ꕨ?

In MediaWiki’s Vai transliteration layout, type nj followed by a.

Why does ꕨ show as a box?

A box or question mark usually means the font lacks Vai support.

MediaWiki’s input documentation describes squares or question marks when a system has no Vai font. Try a font with Vai coverage to see the character’s glyph.