Writing systems of Africa

The writing systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of writing systems on the African continent, both indigenous and those introduced.

Today, the Latin script is commonly encountered across Africa, especially Sub-Saharan Africa. Arabic script is mainly used in North Africa and Ge'ez/Ethiopic Script is dominant in the Horn of Africa. Regionally and in some localities, other scripts may be of significant importance.

Perhaps the most famous writing system of the African continent is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. These developed later into forms known as Hieratic, Demotic and Coptic. The Coptic language is still used today as the liturgical language in the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the Coptic Catholic Church of Alexandria. The Bohairic dialect of Coptic is used currently in the Coptic church. Other dialects include Sahidic, Akhmimic, Lycopolitan, Fayyumic, and Oxyrhynchite.

The Meroitic language was spoken in Meroë and the Sudan during the Meroitic period. It was native to the Kingdom of Kush (modern day Sudan). It was used from 300 BCE to 400 CE.

Old Nubian is an ancient variety of Nubian, used from the 8th to the 15th century. Old Nubian is written in an uncial variant of the Coptic alphabet.

The Tifinagh alphabet is still actively used to varying degrees in trade and modernized forms for writing of Berber languages (Tamazight, Tamashek, etc.) of the Maghreb, Sahara, and Sahel regions (Savage 2008).

Neo-Tifinagh is encoded in the Unicode range U+2D30 to U+2D7F, starting from version 4.1.0. There are 55 defined characters, but there are more characters being used than those defined. In ISO 15924, the code Tfng is assigned to Neo-Tifinagh.

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