Catching up with this belatedly... Swahili, like a number of languages just south of the Sahara, was - and I would guess still is by some - written using Arabic characters (Ajami). The Latin alphabet is indeed now dominant (and certainly "official") for Swahili, and it uses ASCII characters (though not sure if it has an apostrophe which might perhaps ideally be standardized as the letter apostrophe). In West Africa, where I am more familiar with the local practices, it is not that uncommon to find people who read and write their language in Ajami (Hausa, Fula, Manding languages...), even though the official orthographies are based on the Latin alphabet with extended characters.
As for other African scripts, they are most notable in the western and northern parts of the continent. Tifinagh and N'ko are in the process of being encoded. I just had a conversation with someone the other day who recounted seeing a letter written in Tifinagh script in a rural part of northern Niger written by someone to a local chief - quietly this script continues to be used. N'ko of course is much more recent but is promoted by an active grassroots movement. Of Vai and Bamum I know less; and there are other minor ones, for instance, for Wolof and Bambara. I am also checking into another alphabet I heard of but recently saw for the first time (more on that if the info merits). It doesn't take much imagination to think about the potentials of Unicode for facilitating computing and web content in such languages whose speakers as a whole use two (or even three) scripts. Hope this helps. Don ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marco Cimarosti" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "'Philippe Verdy'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, October 20, 2003 1:23 PM Subject: RE: Swahili & Banthu > Philippe Verdy wrote: > > As Africa has been influenced by many foreign invasions, > > there may in fact exist other scripts to represent this > > language [...] > > Yes: until a recent past, Swahili was also commonly written in the Arabic > alphabet. > > _ Marco > > > >
