Upcoming talk: "Inventing Adlam: The Origins and Impact of a New African Writing System"
In the late 1980s, teenage brothers Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry created Adlam, a new script to represent the Fula language. Today, Adlam is used by millions of speakers across more than twenty countries, encoded in the Unicode Standard, and supported on major digital platforms.
This panel brings together the inventors alongside scholars Coleman Donaldson (An ka taa) and Anushah Hossain (Script Encoding Initiative) to examine Adlam within broader questions of language politics, digital infrastructure, and the global circulation of new writing systems.
April 17, 2026 | 10am-12pm PT
Social Science Matrix, 820 Social Sciences Building and on Zoom
Full details and online registration
Sponsored by the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, Letters of the Sahara research project, the Script Encoding Initiative, the Center for African Studies, and the Department of Linguistics