N'Ko alphabet
| N'Ko |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Type |
alphabet
|
| Languages | N'Ko |
| Creator | Solomana Kante |
|
Time period
|
1949 to the present |
| Direction | Right-to-left |
| ISO 15924 | Nkoo, 165 |
|
Unicode alias
|
NKo |
| U+07C0–U+07FF | |
| N'ko | |
|---|---|
| Kangbe | |
| Region | Guinea, Mali, etc. |
|
Native speakers
|
None |
|
Manding koine
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | (insufficiently attested or not a distinct language)nkoa1234
|
N'Ko (ߒߞߏ) is both a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949, as a writing system for the Manding languages of West Africa, and the name of the literary language written in that script. The term N'Ko means I say in all Manding languages.
The script has a few similarities to the Arabic script, notably its direction (right-to-left) and the letters which are connected at the base. Unlike Arabic, it obligatorily marks both tone and vowels. N'Ko tones are marked as diacritics, in a similar manner to the marking of some vowels in Arabic.
Kante created N'Ko in response to what he felt were beliefs that Africans were a cultureless people, because before then, no indigenous African writing system for his language existed. N'Ko came first into use in Kankan, Guinea, as a Maninka alphabet and was disseminated from there into other Mande-speaking parts of West Africa. N'Ko Alphabet Day is April 14, relating to the date in 1949 when the script is believed to have been finalized.
The introduction of the alphabet led to a movement promoting literacy in the N'Ko alphabet among Mande speakers in both Anglophone and Francophone West Africa. N'Ko literacy was instrumental in shaping the Mandinka cultural identity in Guinea, and it has also strengthened the Mande identity in other parts of West Africa.
New findings on N'Ko came to light through the investigation of an anecdote by French officer Colonel Malenfant, who spoke of a mysterious script written in June 1791, in Boucassin, (near Port-au-Prince, Haiti) by a Saint Domingue colony slave named Tamerlan. Literate and a former priest in his home country, Tamerlan wrote down the name of his writing in 3 letters that Haitian researcher Rodney Salnave judged to be N'Ko. If this writing was indeed N'ko, it would imply that the N'ko writing was at the very least two centuries older than believed and that Souleymane Kante did not create the N'Ko alphabet in 1949 ; he only revived it from files that his family brought from hometown Segou, Mali. If this is the case, the original inventor of N'ko may have been future Bambara king Ngolo Diarra, who, in his youth, studied in Timbuktu, Mali, in early 1700's, but not as a Muslim, rather as an animist who became priest to Biton Mamari Coulibaly, founding King of the Ségou Bambara Empire.
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Wikipedia