Somali alphabet

A number of writing systems have been used over the years to transcribe the Somali language. Of these, the Somali Latin alphabet is the most widely used. It has been the official writing script in Somalia since the Supreme Revolutionary Council formally introduced it in October 1972, and was disseminated through a nationwide rural literacy campaign. Prior to the twentieth century, the Arabic script was used for writing Somali. An extensive literary and administrative corpus exists in Arabic script. It was the main script historically used by the various Somali Sultans to keep records. Writing systems developed locally in the twentieth century include the Osmanya, Borama and Kaddare scripts.

The Somali Latin script, or Somali Latin alphabet, was developed by the Somali linguist Shire Jama Ahmed specifically for the Somali language. It uses all letters of the English Latin alphabet except p, v and z, and has 21 consonants and 5 vowels. There are no diacritics or other special characters, except the use of the apostrophe for the glottal stop, which does not occur word-initially. Additionally, there are three consonant digraphs: DH, KH and SH. Tone is not marked, and front and back vowels are not distinguished. Capital letters are used at the beginning of a sentence and for proper names.

A number of attempts had been made from the 1920s onwards to standardize the language using a number of different alphabets. Starting from 1960, debate about which writing system to use for transcribing the Somali language dragged on for nine years. No fewer than a dozen linguists were tasked with developing a workable script. Eventually, Shire Jama Ahmed's refined Somali Latin script was adopted, an alphabet which he used to publish pamphlets and small Af Soomaali drillbooks in his own printing press. Ahmed argued that even though most people were in favor of using the Arabic script, it was more practical to use Latin primarily due to its simplicity, the fact that it lent itself well to writing Somali since it could cope with all of the sounds in the language, and the already widespread existence of machines and typewriters designed for its use. Pamphlets explaining the new standardization were released to the public in a soccer stadium in Mogadishu on October 10, 1972.

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