Two brothers, one alphabet

In 1989, in the town of Nzérékoré in southern Guinea, two Fulani brothers — Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry, still boys — set out to solve a problem that had bothered them for years. Their mother tongue, Fulfulde (also called Pular or Pulaar), had no writing system of its own. People wrote it in Arabic letters or in the Latin alphabet, but neither could capture its sounds — the implosive 𞤩 (ɓ) and 𞤣 (ɗ), the glottal 𞤴 (ƴ) — so readers had to guess.

So the brothers invented their own. Locked in concentration, they drew letters until they had a full alphabet — one shape for every sound in the language, written, like Arabic, from right to left. They named it after its own first four letters: ADLaM, short for Alkule Dandayɗe Leñol Mulugol— roughly, “the alphabet that protects the peoples from vanishing.”

At first it spread by hand. The brothers taught it to family, who taught it to neighbors; it moved along the same trade and family networks that connect Fulani communities across West Africa — Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, and beyond. People copied books, letters, and lessons by hand because there was no other way.

Decades later, ADLaM reached the machines. It was added to the Unicode Standard in 2016, which gave it official code points every computer could recognise. Type-designers drew digital fonts — the letters on this site are set in Noto Sans Adlam — and phones and browsers learned to render it. A script that began on paper in a Guinean town is now something a child anywhere can type, including in the keyboard on this site.

That is the point of Alkule: to carry that work forward — to keep the alphabet, and the language and culture it was built to protect, alive and learnable for anyone, anywhere.