Fula

Letters

Combining marks

Numbers

Punctuation

Other

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	palatal	velar	uvular	pharyneal	glottal
stops	p b		t d tˤ dˤ	t͡ʃ d͡ʒ		k ɡ k͡p g͡b	q		ʔ ʔʲ
	ᵐb		ⁿd	ᶮd͡ʒ		ᵑɡ
implosives	ɓ		ɗ
fricatives	f v	θ	s z sˤ zˤ		ʃ	x ɣ		ʕ	h ɦ
nasals	m		n		ɲ	ŋ
approximants	w		l		j
trills/flaps			r ɾ

Fula is reported to be one of only 3 languages that contrast prenasalized consonants and their corresponding clusters (eg. ᵐb versus mb).@Wikipedia: Prenasalized consonant,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenasalized_consonant

The lighter coloured phones are used for foreign sounds, especially for Arabic but also for sounds of other African languages. These are not usually mentioned in descriptions of the Latin and Arabic orthographies for Fula, but they are listed here principally because Adlam was designed with ways of writing those sounds.

Observation: A few sources mention a letter that represents the sound ɠ, found in Guinea, and written in the Latin orthography with the same symbol (though previously written using q). No examples of this sound have been encountered in my research.

Tone

Languages in the Atlantic group of the Niger-Congo family, of which Fula is one, are unusual in that they are not tonal.

Structure

Fula has 2 regular syllable types: CV and CVC, where V can be a short or long vowel, and an initial C may be a glottal stop. Only a small number of sounds can occur as a coda, and closed syllables are much less common than open ones.

The distinction between long and short vowels is phonemically distinctive.

Consonant clusters only occur where a syllable follows a closed syllable. Gemination is, however, a distinctive feature.

A syllable can only contain a single vowel.lhs

Vowel summary table

The following table summarises the main vowel to character assigments.

Lowercase is shown on the left, uppercase on the right.

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

Post-consonant vowels

Vowels are written using 5 vowel letters (10 counting both uppercase and lowercase). One of two combining marks is used above them to indicate long vowels. A nukta diacritic can be used to indicate the sounds e and o (though they are rare).

Shaping & positioning

The latest glyph reform introduces visual differences in the shapes used for the lengthening diacritic, not only between the alif lengthener and other lengtheners, but also between upper vs lowercase letters.p The top row below is lowercase, and uppercase is below it.

𞤭𞥅␣𞤵𞥅␣𞤫𞥅␣𞤮𞥅␣𞤢𞥄

𞤋𞥅␣𞤓𞥅␣𞤉𞥅␣𞤌𞥅␣𞤀𞥄

Standalone vowels

Standalone vowels are written using ordinary vowel letters and no special arrangements.

𞤉𞤲𞤫𞥅𞤲

𞤢𞥄𞤬𞤭𞤴𞤢

Vowel sounds to characters

Consonant summary table

The following table summarises the main consonant to character assigments.

The right column shows letters used in loan words and foreign pronunciations (especially Arabic), but not usually used for native Fula text.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Basic consonants

Fula uses the following basic set of consonant characters. Lowercase above, uppercase below.

Loan words & proper nouns

A set of supplementary letters are used for loan words and proper nouns originated in neighbouring ethnic groups.

Non-native sounds

Adlam has 3 diacritics for extending letters to cover non-native sounds (principally Arabic).

1E948 and 1E94A provide the basic diacritics. They are shown here in lowercase, with corresponding Arabic letters.

The third diacritic, 1E949, is used when one of these modified letters is also geminated.

Glottal stop

When a consonant is followed immediately by a glottal stop and then a vowel, the glottal stop is represented using the diacritic 1E947 over the preceding consonant (see fig_glottal_stop).e,2

A word-initial standalone vowel begins with an unwritten glottal stop.

𞤢𞤧𞤢𞤥𞤢𞥄𞤲

Observation: It appears that an apostrophe is used for the glottal stop that occurs with word-medial standalone vowels? eg. 𞤸𞤢ʼ𞤢𞤤𞤢 haʼala

Pre-nasalised consonants

Pre-nasalised consonants are indicated by adding 𞥋, called 𞤻𞤮𞤲𞤣𞤢𞤤 nyondal, between 𞤲 and the consonant affected. The nyondal is used to clarify the syllable boundaries, eg. compare 𞤸𞤭𞤲𞥋𞤣𞤵 𞤸𞤭𞤲𞤣𞤵

Word-initially, the nyondal may or may not be usedsow, so either of the 2 following spellings are possible: 𞤲𞥋𞤺𞤵𞤪𞤫 𞤲𞤺𞤵𞤪𞤫

Other places where the nyondal is not needed includesow:

• when word-medial but not preceded by a vowel, eg.

  𞤩𞤫𞤴𞤲𞤺𞤵

• after a long vowel, eg.

  𞤱𞤫𞥅𞤲𞤣𞤵

If it appears between two joined letters, the nasalisation character should not break that join.

This character was added to Unicode version 12. Prior to that, people used an apostrophe, but that is not desirable, because it breaks the cursive joining.

Onsets

Other than the prenasalised consonants, Fula has no special features related to syllable onsets.

Finals

Fula has no dedicated characters to represent syllable codas or other consonant clusters. Ordinary consonant letters are simply used in a cluster.

𞤢𞤥𞤣𞤫

𞤬𞤮𞥅𞤬𞤣𞤫

Consonant clusters

Consonant clusters are generally only found where one syllable ends with a coda and the next begins with a consonant. They are not complicated, and the number of consonant sounds that can appear in a coda are limited.

Apart from the prenasalised consonants, Fula has no conjuncts or other special mechanisms for handling consonant clusters. There is no diacritic like the Arabic sukun to indicate vowel absence. A simple sequence of consonant letters is used. (But see clength.) Examples:

𞤪𞤫𞤥𞤣𞤫

𞤬𞤭𞤶𞤣𞤫

Gemination

Gemination of consonants is normally indicated using 1E946,e,2 eg. compare 𞤧𞤢𞤳𞤫 𞤧𞤢𞤳𞥆𞤫

As mentioned in extendedC, letters that have consonant modifier diacritics use a special code point, 1E949 that combines the gemination marker with the modifier.

Letters that combine with 1E94A should move that diacritic below the base character and keep the gemination mark above, eg. see fig_gemination.

Consonant sounds to characters

Digits

Adlam uses native digits.

Unlike other right-to-left scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Thaana, (but like N'Ko) the numbers are displayed right-to-left, with the most significant digit first.e This means that numbers don't produce bidirectional text in Adlam

fig_numbers refers to a date of 15 October 2022.

The shape of 𞥖 was significantly changed by the 2019 glyph shape reform to make it less similar to the letter HA.p

For thousands and decimal separators, Adlam uses a space and a period, respectively.n

Managing text direction

Unicode provides a set of 10 formatting characters that can be used to control the direction of text when displayed. These characters have no visual form in the rendered text, however text editing applications may have a way to show their location.

202B (RLE), 202A (LRE), and 202C (PDF) are in widespread use to set the base direction of a range of characters. RLE/LRE comes at the start, and PDF at the end of a range of characters for which the base direction is to be set.

In Unicode 6.1, the Unicode Standard added a set of characters which do the same thing but also isolate the content from surrounding characters, in order to avoid spillover effects. They are 2067 (RLI), 2066 (LRI), and 2066 (PDI). The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead.

There is also 2068 (FSI), used initially to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.

061C (ALM) is used to produce correct sequencing of numeric data. Follow the link and see expressions for details.

200F (RLM) and 200E (LRM) are invisible characters with strong directional properties that are also sometimes used to produce the correct ordering of text.

For more information about how to use these formatting characters see How to use Unicode controls for bidi text. Note, however, that when writing HTML you should generally use markup rather than these control codes. For information about that, see Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts.

Writing styles

Adlam is usually cursive, ie. letters in a word are joined up (see cursive and fig_joined_writing_style), however a non-cursive writing style (see fig_unjoined_writing_style) is sometimes used, mainly as display fonts for books and article titles as well as educational content (because the unconnected script is easier to learn).n

See variants for information about recent glyph shape changes.

Cursive text

When Adlam is cursive (see writing_styles), letters in a word are joined up. Fonts need to produce the appropriate joining form for a letter, according to its visual context, but the code point remains the same. This results in four different glyphs for most letters (including an isolated glyph).

The cursive treatment doesn't produce major variations of the essential part of the glyph for a character (unlike Arabic), but there are some small adaptations.

Unlike Arabic and Syriac scripts, no glyphs join only on one side.

Context-based shaping & positioning

Fula letters need to be shaped for cursive joining (see just above). Otherwise, there is not much contextual glyph shaping. There are no conjuncts or special shaping for consonant clusters.

Context does affect the shape of the vowel-lengthening diacritic when placed over upper vs lowercase letters.p

Fula has combining marks, which need to be placed relative to their base character. And in some cases multiple combining marks are attached to a single base, which leads to further context-sensitive positioning of glyphs.

For example, 1E94A usually sits above the letter it modifies, but if the letter is also lengthened or geminated, it moves below the letter and leaves the lengthening/gemination diacritic above.

Letterform slopes, weights, & italics

See type samples.

Adlam texts use both bolding and italics.

The Kigelia font may be the first italicised Adlam tyeface, but its development was based on requests from the community of users. Discussion with the community led to an italic form that leans to the right (unlike N'Ko).g,#issuecomment-512911833

Word boundaries

The concept of 'word' is difficult to define in any language (see What is a word?). Here, a word is a vaguely-defined, but recognisable semantic unit that is typically smaller than a phrase and may comprise one or more syllables.

Adlam words are separated by spaces.

Graphemes

Graphemes in Adlam consist of single letters or letters with one or two combining marks. This means that text can be segmented into typographic units using grapheme clusters.

Phrase, sentence, and section delimiters are described in phrase.

Phrase & section boundaries

See type samples.

The question mark, ؟, is from the Arabic block, but the comma and semicolon are ⹁ and ⁏, respectively, rather than the Arabic comma and semicolon. (The Arabic comma/semicolon are only used as carryovers from the older Adlam fonts.)n

𞥟 and 𞥞 are used to begin a phrase that is a question or exclamation, respectively, much like ¿ and ¡ in Spanish. The phrase ends using an Arabic question mark or ASCII exclamation mark,e,2 eg.

𞥟 𞤢𞤤𞤢𞥄 ؟

𞥞 𞤢𞤤𞤢𞥄 !

The shapes of these question and exclamation punctuation marks were significantly changed in the 2019 shape reform, with the aim of making them more visually appealing.

Observation: The punctuation marks appear to be separated from the rest of the text by a space.

Mirrored characters

The words 'left' and 'right' in Unicode names for parentheses, brackets, and other paired characters should be ignored. LEFT should be read as if it said START, and RIGHT as END. The direction in which the glyphs point will be automatically determined according to the base direction of the text.

The number of characters that are mirrored in this way is around 550, most of which are mathematical symbols. Some are single characters, rather than pairs. The following are some of the more common ones.

(␣)␣<␣>␣[␣]␣{␣}␣«␣»␣‹␣›

Quotations & citations

See type samples.

Adlam texts use the following punctuation around quotations. Of course, due to keyboard design, quotations may also be surrounded by ASCII double and single quote marks.

The row labelled 'initial' indicates the usual default quote marks.

Note that these characters are not mirrored during display in RTL text. This means that LEFT indicates use on the left, and RIGHT indicates use on the right, unlike other types of paired punctuation. That is why, in the table above, the 'start' and 'end' columns in the table above are ordered as they are.

Abbreviation, ellipsis & repetition

See type samples.

Adlam text uses the 3-dot ellipsis ….

Line breaking & hyphenation

Adlam text breaks primarily at the spaces around words. In-word breaks using hyphenation also occur.

Text alignment & justification

See type samples.

Fully-justified text in Fula is produced by adding spaces between words, but long words may be hyphenated to reduce the overall space added.g

In the past, justification involved stretching the baseline, using ـ, but the modern preference is to use interword spacing, instead. See also historical_justification.

Baselines, line height, etc.

Adlam uses the so-called 'alphabetic' baseline, which is the same as for Latin and many other scripts.

Adlam places vowel and tone marks above base characters, and can also add combining characters below the line. The resulting complexity means that the vertical resolution needed for clearly readable Fula text is higher than for English, or most Latin text.

To give an approximate idea, fig_baselines compares Latin and Adlam glyphs from the Noto Sans font. The basic height of lowercase Adlam letters is typically around the Latin x-height, however diacritics reach well beyond the Latin ascenders, creating a need for larger line spacing. The vertical height is further increased when dealing with capital letters.

Counters, lists, etc.

See type samples.

You can experiment with counter styles using the Counter styles converter. Patterns for using these styles in CSS can be found in Ready-made Counter Styles, and we use the names of those patterns here to refer to the various styles.

The Fula orthography uses a numeric style using native digits.

Prefixes and suffixes

The default list style uses a full stop + space as a suffix.

Observation: The Winden Jangen site has scans of a number of books which use ordered lists, and they use Adlam numbers (see fig_cs_numeric).

Styling initials

See type samples.

Drop caps can be found in Fulah text written with the Adlam script (more commonly than raised caps).

The initial character and the character that follows it are unjoined.^§

General page layout & progression

Fula books, magazines, etc. written using the Adlam script are bound on the right-hand side, and pages progress from right to left.

Columns are vertical but run right-to-left across the page.

Layout direction

The right-to-left orientation of the script affects the direction of page layout, and of the layout of items within the page.

The page shown in fig_layout is the mirror-image of pages in, say, French. Note the various navigation items on the page, and the progression of numbers at the bottom of the page.

On the other hand, the video controls assume a LTR direction. This is mostly constrained by technology at the moment, and whether or not this is acceptable is still being debated.

Orthographic development & variants

In 2019 the design of Adlam letter glyphs was overhauled in a proposal to the Unicode Consortium, which resulted in changes to the code chart. p

Typical changes involved standardising the shapes across cursive forms, better distinctions between lower and uppercase forms, removal of some ascenders to avoid diacritic collisions, and then addition of some small ascenders to help distinguish joined forms.

There were also some significant shape changes, particularly to make supplementary letters look more like those used for similar, standard sounds, or to make letters easier to read.

Although there are not many Adlam Unicode fonts, and they will be changed, legacy forms are likely to persist for some time alongside the new forms.

The 2017 release of the Noto Sans Adlam font (still in use in early 2020) contained a set of glyphs that sometimes matched one or other of the shapes shown in variant_shapes, and sometimes used completely different shapes from either. The Noto fonts were updated to the new shapes in September 2020.

Click here to also show in variant_shapes shapes produced by the Noto Sans Adlam font at the start of 2020. Red underlines highlight some characters that don't resemble either of the other charts.

Historical approaches to justification

In the early stages of Adlam typography it was quite common to see full justification of printed text that was produced by stretching baselines, rather than by adjusting inter-word spaces. This was influenced by the use of keyboards based on Arabic code points. Handwritten documents, however, were not justified in this way.

Observation: The Winden Jangen site has scans of a number of books which apply full justification. The method of justification appears to be elongation of the baseline, with no affect on the inter-word spacing. See fig_justification. In narrow columns this can produce some exaggerated stretching, as seen in fig_justification_wide. There are many passages in the samples available that apply this exaggerated stretching. Some content also applies justification to the last line in a paragraph, which sometimes produces even wider elongations.