African Reference Alphabet

The African Reference Alphabet is a largely defunct continent-wide guideline for the creation of Latin alphabets for African languages. Two variants of the initial proposal (one in English and a second in French) were made at a 1978 UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger. They were based on the results of several earlier conferences on the harmonization of established Latin alphabets of individual languages. The 1978 conference recommended the use of single letters for speech sounds rather than of letter sequences or of letters with diacritics. A substantial overhaul was proposed in 1982 but was rejected in a follow-up conference held in Niamey in 1984. Since then, continent-wide harmonization has been largely abandoned, because regional needs, practices and thus preferences differ greatly across Africa.

Through the individual languages that were its basis, the African Reference Alphabet inherits from the Africa Alphabet and, like its predecessor, uses a number of IPA letters. The Niamey conference built on the work of a previous UNESCO-organized meeting, on harmonizing the 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 was a set of 57 letters, given in both upper-case and lower-case forms. Eight of these are formed from common Latin letters with the addition of an underline mark. Some (the uppercase letters alpha, eth (), esh, and both lower- and upper-case , ) cannot be accurately represented in Unicode (as of version 15, 2023). Others do not correspond to the upper- and lower-case identities in Unicode, or (e.g. Ʒ, Ʃ) require character variants in the font.

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

The letters presented in the Annex 1 of the 1978 Niamey meeting report are slightly different from the ones presented on page 34 (page 32 in the French version) which omitted the hooktop-z but included two apostrophe-like letters (for ʔ and ʕ). Five of the letters were written with a subscript dot instead of a subscript dash as in the English version (ḍ ḥ ṣ ṭ and ẓ). The French and English sets are otherwise identical.

Notes:

A proposed revision of the alphabet was made in 1982 by Michael Mann and David Dalby, who had attended the Niamey conference. It has 60 letters. Digraphs are retained only for vowel length and geminate consonants, and even there they suggest replacements. A key feature of this proposal is that, like the French proposal of 1978, it consists only of lower-case letters, making it unicase. It did not meet with acceptance at the follow-up Niamey meeting in 1984.