Vai syllabary

The Vai font is the font with which the West African nation of Vai, which speaks to the Mandingo dialect Vai, recording his language.

History

The origin of this syllabary is unclear. Local sources reported that the Vai writing was invented 1829-1839. Its inventor was probably the Liberians Momolu Duwalu Bukele. Others prefer an influence by that time also quite new Cherokee syllabary into consideration, according to which members of who had emigrated to Liberia Cherokee people, may have been involved in the emergence and rapid spread of the Vai script.

In 1981 were within the male population Vai about 20 % read their language in the Vai script and write, while 16 % had some degree of competence in reading and writing of Arabic (especially - but not only - in reading the Quran ) and about 6% could read and write in the English language.

Transcription

The implementation of the Vai script into Latin characters is not uniform: while a transliteration is used in ASCII characters in the Unicode block Vai, there are in the field of linguistics different transcriptions, which are based more or less on Africa alphabet. Here are some examples of the websites listed below:

Syllable panel

The following table shows the Standardsyllabar of 1962 with additions of Momolu Massaquoi from 1911 and a number of characters for foreign vowels:

- Called nasal.

Logograms

The oldest Vai texts contained various logograms, of which, however, only ꘓ and ꘘ are in use.

Number of characters

Vai uses the Arabic numerals ( 0-9 ). The designed in the 1920s own numerals were never used.