The African Reference Alphabet is a largely defunct continent-wide guideline for the creation of Latin alphabets for African languages. Two variants of the initial proposal (one in English and a second in French) were made at a 1978 UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger. They were based on the results of several earlier conferences on the harmonization of established Latin alphabets of individual languages. The 1978 conference recommended the use of single letters for speech sounds rather than of letter sequences or of letters with diacritics. A substantial overhaul was proposed in 1982 but was rejected in a follow-up conference held in Niamey in 1984. Since then, continent-wide harmonization has been largely abandoned, because regional needs, practices and thus preferences differ greatly across Africa.[1]
Through the individual languages that were its basis, the African Reference Alphabet inherits from the Africa Alphabet, and like the latter uses a number of IPA letters. The Niamey conference built on the work of a previous UNESCO-organized meeting, on harmonizing the transcriptions of African languages, that was held in Bamako, Mali, in 1966.
^Karan & Roberts (2020: 925) Orthography standardization. In Dimmendaal & Vossen (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of African Languages.
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The AfricanReferenceAlphabet is a largely defunct continent-wide guideline for the creation of Latin alphabets for African languages. Two variants of...
The AfricaAlphabet (also International AfricanAlphabet or IAI alphabet) is a set of letters designed as the basis for Latin alphabets for the languages...
GREEK CAPITAL LETTER CHI. AfricaAlphabetAfricanreferencealphabet Dinka alphabet Pan-Nigerian alphabet Standard Alphabet by Lepsius Osborn, Don; Osborn...
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creating written standards for non-European languages, such as the Africanreferencealphabet. Although Latin did not use diacritical marks, signs of truncation...
African D (Ɖ, ɖ) is a Latin letter representing the voiced retroflex plosive [ɖ]. It is a part of the Africanreferencealphabet. It is mainly used by...
produced the Africanreferencealphabet. Various country-level standardizations have also been made or proposed, such as the Pan-Nigerian alphabet. A Berber...
used in the orthographies of many African languages using the Africanreferencealphabet. The Yucatec Maya language used Ɔ to transcribe the alveolar ejective...
distinguished in some extended Latin alphabet systems, such as the 1978 version of the Africanreferencealphabet. In that system, the former is the uppercase...
may refer to: Ǝ, a letter used in several alphabets, such as Pan-Nigerian or the AfricanReferenceAlphabet ɘ, the IPA symbol for the close-mid central...
the vowel [ɛ] or [e̙], and is included in the Africanreferencealphabet. In the Berber Latin alphabet currently[when?] used in Algerian Berber school...
version of the Latin alphabet was proposed in 1982 by Michael Mann and David Dalby, as a variation of the Niamey AfricanReferenceAlphabet, but has never seen...
in Northern Nigeria and the AfricaAlphabet. Post independence African governments decided to retain the Latin alphabet as the basis for transcribing...
Omega was also adopted into the Latin alphabet, as a letter of the 1982 revision to the Africanreferencealphabet. It's in sparce use (see Latin omega)...
minuscule: ɑ), script a, or single-story a, is a letter of the Latin alphabet based on one lowercase form of a, or on the Greek lowercase alpha (α)....
An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters correspond to phonemes, the...
lowercase retroflex D in a 1982 revision of the Africanreferencealphabet. This revision of the alphabet eliminated uppercase forms, so there was no conflict...
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