African reference alphabet

An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended the use of single letters for a sound (actually a phoneme) instead of using two or three-letter combinations, or letters with diacritical marks.

The African Reference Alphabet is clearly related to the Africa Alphabet and reflected practice based on the latter (including use of IPA characters). The Niamey conference also built on work of a previous UNESCO-organized meeting on harmonization of transcriptions of African languages, that was held in Bamako, Mali in 1966.

Separate versions of the conference's report were produced in English and French. Different images of the alphabet were used in the two versions, and there are a number of differences between the two.

The English version proposed an alphabet of 57 letters, given in both upper and lower-case forms. Eight of these are formed from common Latin letters with the addition of an underline mark (_). Several of the glyphs, mostly upper-case forms, are unusual and cannot (yet) be accurately represented in Unicode.

This version also listed eight accents (acute accent ( ´ ), grave accent ( ` ), circumflex ( ^ ), caron ( ˇ ), macron ( ¯ ), tilde ( ˜ ), trema ( ¨ ), and a superscript dot (˙) and nine punctuation marks (  ? ! ( ) « » , ; . ).

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