N'Ko

The word N'Ko written in the N'Ko alphabet

N'Ko is a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949 as a writing system for the Mande languages of West Africa; N'Ko means 'I say' in all Mande languages. Kante created N'Ko in response to what he felt were beliefs that Africans were a "cultureless people" since there was prior to this time no indigenous African writing system for his language. N'Ko came first into use in Kankan, Guinea, as a Maninka alphabet and disseminated from there into other Mande-speaking parts of West Africa. "N'Ko Alphabet Day" is April 14, relating to April 14, 1949, the date the script is believed to have been finalized.

The script has a few similarities to the Arabic alphabet, notably its direction (right-to-left) and the connected letters. It obligatorily marks both tone and vowels.

The introduction of the alphabet led to a movement promoting literacy in the N'Ko alphabet among Mande speakers in both Anglophone and Francophone West Africa. N'Ko literacy was instrumental in shaping the Maninka cultural identity in Guinea, and has also strengthened the Mande identity in other parts of West Africa (Oyler 1994).

As of 2005, it is principally used in Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire (respectively by Maninka and Dyula-speakers), with an active user community in Mali (by Bambara-speakers). Publications include a translation of the Qur'an, a variety of textbooks on subjects such as physics and geography, poetic and philosophical works, descriptions of traditional medicine, a dictionary, and several local newspapers. The literary language used is intended as a koine blending elements of the principal Manding languages (which are mutually intelligible), but has a particularly strong Maninka flavour.

At least in Mali, the Latin script with several phonetic additions is much in use. This might be due to the lack of support for N'Ko on computers, notably in Unicode, but is more likely due to the education system which is still mostly in French, and the general omnipresence of writings in these languages.

UNESCO's Programme Initiative B@bel supported the preparation of a proposal to encode N'Ko in Unicode. In 2004, the proposal, presented by three professors of N'Ko (Baba Mamadi Diané, Mamady Doumbouya, and Karamo Kaba Jammeh) working with Michael Everson was approved for ballotting by the ISO working group WG2. In 2006 N'Ko was approved for Unicode 5.0.

References

Dalby, David (1969) 'Further indigenous scripts of West Africa: Mandin, Wolof and Fula alphabets and Yoruba 'Holy' writing', ''African Language Studies, 10, pp. 161–181.
Everson, Michael, Mamady Doumbouya, Mamadi Baba Diané, & Karamo Jammeh. 2004. [Proposal to add the N’Ko script to the BMP of the UCS]
Oyler, Dianne White (1994) Mande identity through literacy, the N'ko writing system as an agent of cultural nationalism. Toronto : African Studies Association.
Oyler, Dianne White (1997) 'The N'ko alphabet as a vehicle of indigenist historiography', History in Africa, 24, pp. 239–256.
Singler, John Victor (1996) 'Scripts of West Africa', in Daniels, Peter T., & Bright, William (eds) The World's Writing Systems, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc. pp. 593–598.
Vydrine, Valentin F. (2001) 'Souleymane Kanté, un philosophe-innovateur traditionnaliste maninka vu à travers ses écrits en nko', Mande Studies, 3, pp. 99–131.
Wyrod, Christopher (2003) 'The Light on the Horizon: N'ko Literacy and Formal Schooling in Guinea', MA Thesis, George Washington University. [link to text]
[B@bel and Script Encoding Initiative Supporting Linguistic Diversity in Cyberspace] 12-11-2004 (UNESCO)

External links

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