What ꖙ means
Type w, then u in a Vai transliteration layout.
MediaWiki’s Vai transliteration layout maps w followed by u to ꖙ.
Why does ꖙ show as a square? In an app without a Vai font, ꖙ may appear as a square or question mark even when the text contains the character.
What does ꖙ stand for?
It writes the Vai syllable conventionally transcribed as wu.
Within a Vai word, it contributes that syllable. By itself, it identifies a syllable but not why the sender chose it.
Vai writing served community life
A 2002 archival study dates the script’s development to about 1832–33 and describes a Harvard-held manuscript as the earliest surviving manuscript from sub-Saharan Africa in a locally developed script.
Vai was taught in schools and used for letters, account books, family histories, and other records. Some early writing served Islamic purposes; the script also carried secular correspondence and record-keeping.
Vai’s syllabary, a set of written signs for syllables, was standardized and adapted repeatedly; ꖙ is one entry in that evolving system.
Linguistic and context-dependent; alone, it reads as a syllable sample or fragment.
Use it alone only with a reader of Vai; otherwise, add context.
Part of the collection
Who writes ꖙ
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Don't confuse it with
2
Questions people ask
1Was Vai borrowed from Cherokee?
A direct Cherokee borrowing is not established in the 2002 study, which discusses possible contact. Influence from Arabic and Latin writing has also been proposed.
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11
How to type or find ꖙ
- Also called
- wu · vai wu
- Search it as
- vai keyboard · vai transliteration · vai font · vai script
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ꖙ\A599Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.