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The writing systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of writing systems on the African continent, both indigenous and those introduced. In many African societies, history generally used to be recorded orally despite most societies having developed a writing script, leading to them being termed "oral civilisations" in ...
Ajami (Arabic: عجمي , ʿajamī) or Ajamiyya (Arabic: عجمية , ʿajamiyyah), which comes from the Arabic root for 'foreign' or 'stranger', is an Arabic-derived script used for writing African languages, particularly Songhai, Mandé, Hausa and Swahili, although many other languages are also written using the script, including Mooré, Pulaar, Wolof, and Yoruba.
Although many African languages are used on the radio, in newspapers and in primary-school education, and some of the larger ones are considered national languages, only a few are official at the national level. In Sub-Saharan Africa, most official languages at the national level tend to be colonial languages such as French, Portuguese, or English.
The defining feature of the tradition of Ajami script in Sub-Saharan Africa, is that whereas in Arabic (and many other languages whose script has been derived from Arabic), vowel diacritics are generally dropped unless an ambiguity needs to be clarified, vowel diacritics are always written.
The earliest written language associated with the Nilo-Saharan family is Old Nubian, one of the oldest written African languages, attested in writing from the 8th to the 15th century AD. This larger classification system is not accepted by all linguists, however.
It became one of South Africa's 12 official languages in 1994. [5] According to Ethnologue, it is the second-most widely spoken of the Bantu languages, after Swahili. [a] Like many other Bantu languages, it is written with the Latin alphabet. In South African English, the language is often referred to in its native form, isiZulu. [9]
Combined green: Definition of "sub-Saharan Africa" as used in the statistics of United Nations institutions Lighter green: The Sudan, classified as a part of North Africa by the United Nations Statistics Division [2] instead of Eastern Africa, though the organization states that "the assignment of countries or areas to specific groupings is for statistical convenience and does not imply any ...
West African Muslim scholars, who were bilingual or multilingual [1] and constituted what is collectively a West African intelligentsia that shaped West African historiography, [3] composed the majority of West African manuscripts; most of the manuscripts were composed in the Ajami script and Arabic script. [1]