Adlam teaching book, 1990s
This is among the second generation of textbooks used by the Barry brothers to teach the Adlam writing system to people in their town. Fellow students helped create the illustrations based on the school books they were all using at the time.
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In 1989, two brothers in Guinea, aged 10 and 14, invented an alphabet for their native language. Pulaar (and Fulfulde) were spoken by millions of Fula people dispersed across Western Africa, but had no writing system of their own. Within a few years, the boys’ script spread like wildfire, as a culture embraced a new literacy. The alphabet is called ADLaM (or Adlam) after its first four letters and an acronym for a phrase meaning “the alphabet that protects a people from vanishing.”
On March 19, 2019, we’re honored to host Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry for a Letterform Lecture at SFPL. They’ll be joined by type designers Mark Jamra and Neil Patel who are creating the first complete font family for Adlam.
Adlam teaching book, 1990s
This is among the second generation of textbooks used by the Barry brothers to teach the Adlam writing system to people in their town. Fellow students helped create the illustrations based on the school books they were all using at the time.
—
In 1989, two brothers in Guinea, aged 10 and 14, invented an alphabet for their native language. Pulaar (and Fulfulde) were spoken by millions of Fula people dispersed across Western Africa, but had no writing system of their own. Within a few years, the boys’ script spread like wildfire, as a culture embraced a new literacy. The alphabet is called ADLaM (or Adlam) after its first four letters and an acronym for a phrase meaning “the alphabet that protects a people from vanishing.”
On March 19, 2019, we’re honored to host Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry for a Letterform Lecture at SFPL. They’ll be joined by type designers Mark Jamra and Neil Patel who are creating the first complete font family for Adlam.