What does it mean to lose a language? Deep knowledge, passed down over millennia—gone. Ways of thinking about the land, the sea, the sky, and the flora and fauna that inhabit them. Rituals and recipes. Myths and memories, erased. And for those who spoke the language, it means losing a part of themselves.
It happens every three months. A language—an irreplaceable key to understanding the world—fades away. By the end of the century, as much as 90% of the world’s 6,500 languages will be gone forever.
Languages are prisms through which we look at the world. A shared understanding that binds a people together. A diversity of languages encourages a diversity of thought, of perspectives, of sense-making. Every language tells us a little bit about who we are. When a language dies, a sliver of our shared culture vanishes, and humanity is poorer for the loss.
The language of the Fulani people of West Africa, known as Pulaar, is spoken by over 40 million people, so it’s not in immediate danger. However, for most of its history, Pulaar never had an alphabet. Fulani are increasingly doing business, finding information, and expressing themselves via text on mobile devices. And if they can’t communicate digitally with an alphabet that reflects the language they speak, they will use other writing systems, and one day, other languages.
For languages that have no digital script, the writing is on the wall.
Thirty years ago, two Fulani brothers took it upon themselves to reverse this inevitability. They created an alphabet that would one day spread across the global Fulani community and beyond. It would come to be known as ADLaM, an acronym using the alphabet’s first four letters, which stands for Alkule Dandayɗe Leñol Mulugol, or “the alphabet that protects the people from vanishing.”
