Alphabet side-Nigerian

The alphabet side-Nigerian is a whole of Latin characters including/understanding diacritées letters and additional letters. It was conceived so that one can, in theory, to write all the languages of the Nigeria (more than 250 according to the method of calculation, among whom the Yoruba , the Haoussa, the Igbo, the Peul, the édo etc) by means of the same whole of signs. In addition to the diacritic ones creating new letters, there is the different one, more or less often used, making it possible to note the your S of the languages, like the Acute accent, the Grave accent, the Circumflex accent, the Macron, etc

In practice, the alphabet side-Nigerian does not allow the written transcription of all the languages of Nigeria but could be used as reference to the installation of other alphabets for Africa, like the international Alphabet of Niamey.

History

It is in the years 1980 that the government of Nigeria, and more precisely its National Language Center, decided, to standardize with the writing a linguistic situation complexes (one can count more than 250 languages in this country, which are not inevitably written), to develop a whole of natures suitable for transcribe all the languages of the territory. It as had to be envisaged an alphabet as one pût to find on the typewriters, important administrative tool. At the time of a conference devoted to the question of the typewriters held in 1983 in Bénin, the model proposed in 1981 by the professor of linguistics Kay Williamson and improved by linguists Nigerians was officially regarded as the starting point of a formal research.

Hermann Zapf, professor and German calligrapher, gave the final version of it.

Graphème S

There is, in this theoretical alphabet (all the languages do not use of course all the possible letters), no Digramme. The model was finalized by Hermann Zapf. Here without the diacritic appendices (E E, E E and E E):

As presented here in the years 1980 by the firm Olivetti to the National Language Centers of Nigeria for a project of typewriter:

Remarks

The diacritic one subscribes of the letters which one quoted there in the form Ẹ , Ṣ , etc, is normally not a Point subscribed but a subscribed vertical Barre. One should thus write E̩ , S̩ , etc the C-Ws communication with the point, however, are increasingly current, of the precomposed characters being envisaged by Unicode, contrary to the C-Ws communication with subscribed bar.

One notices a direct influence of linguistics in the creation of the alphabet: symbols like ɓ , ɗ , ǝ and ƙ are indeed directly borrowed from the International Phonetic Alphabet with the same phonetic value. The absence of symbols like ŋ , ɛ and ɔ , largely included in other Latin alphabets of Africa (to consult international Alphabet of Niamey ), is however notable. These is undoubtedly the gaps which explain its weak success.

Currently, the stock of characters necessary for the orthographies of the languages of Nigeria is the following:
ā a̱ ạ ḅ ɓ ḍ ɗ e̱ ẹ ɛ ə ḥ ị ɨ ƙ ṅ ṇ ŋ ñ n̄ o̱ ọ ɔ ʌ ṣ ụ ʼwʼy ẓ ʼ

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