Souag, Lameen (2010) 'Ajami in West Africa.' Afrikanistik online, 2010 .
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West Africans throughout the region have creatively adapted the Arabic script to write non-Arabic languages, a form of literacy known as Ajami which remains widespread today despite little or no government support. The variety of methods used to extend the Arabic script to fit other phonological systems are of particular interest: methods that appear unmotivated from a purely linguistic perspective can readily be explained as rational adaptations to the parallel educational system in which Ajami is typically learned, an issue often not taken into account in orthography planning.
|Keywords:||Arabic, West Africa, Sahel, Ajami, orthography development, literacy, writing systems|
|SOAS Departments & Centres:||Faculty of Languages and Cultures > Department of Linguistics|
|Copyright Statement:||Any party may pass on this Work by electronic means and make it available for download under the terms and conditions of the Digital Peer Publishing License. The text of the license may be accessed and retrieved via Internet at http://www.dipp.nrw.de/lizenzen/dppl/dppl/DPPL_v2_en_06-2004.html|
|Depositing User:||Lameen Souag|
|Date Deposited:||19 Mar 2012 10:51|
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