Meeting the Barry brothers in Portland, TypeCon 2018
If you told me two young boys invented a writing system from scratch which then spread to millions in less than a decade, I’d say it was fantastic fiction. But it’s real. Last year I got to meet the inventors who brought along manuscripts and textbooks from the early days of Adlam. So incredible to see the unassuming marks that would later teach an entire diaspora to read. It was tough to keep my eyes dry.
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In 1989, two brothers in Guinea, aged 10 and 14, invented an alphabet from scratch 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.
Photo by Laura Serra.
Meeting the Barry brothers in Portland, TypeCon 2018
If you told me two young boys invented a writing system from scratch which then spread to millions in less than a decade, I’d say it was fantastic fiction. But it’s real. Last year I got to meet the inventors who brought along manuscripts and textbooks from the early days of Adlam. So incredible to see the unassuming marks that would later teach an entire diaspora to read. It was tough to keep my eyes dry.
—
In 1989, two brothers in Guinea, aged 10 and 14, invented an alphabet from scratch 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.
Photo by Laura Serra.