Pan-Nigerian Alphabet

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The Pan-Nigerian Alphabet is a set of 33 Latin letters standardized by the National Language Centre of Nigeria in the 1980s. It is intended to be sufficient to write all the languages of Nigeria without using digraphs.

Contents

[edit] History

Several hundred different languages are spoken in Nigeria. The different Latin-based orthographies impeded the use of typewriters etc. In the 1980s the National Language Centre (NLC) undertook to develop a single alphabet suitable for writing all the languages of the country, taking as its starting point a model proposed by linguist Kay Williamson in 1981. The final version and reference typeface were developed by the typographer Hermann Zapf in 1985.

[edit] Characters

Image:Pannigerian.png
If you have a Unicode font installed with the Pan-Nigerian glyphs then you should see an identical table below:

Upper case A B Ɓ C D Ɗ E Ǝ Ẹ F G
Lower case a b ɓ c d ɗ e ǝ ẹ f g
Upper case H I Ị J K Ƙ L M N O Ọ
Lower case h i ị j k ƙ l m n o ọ
Upper case P R S Ṣ T U Ụ V W Y Z
Lower case p r s ṣ t u ụ v w y z

The acute, grave and circumflex accents are also used to mark High, Low, and Falling tone respectively. Mid tone (in languages which contrast High, Mid, and Low) is left unmarked.

[edit] Keyboard

The following typewriter keyboard was produced for the NLC by Olivetti:

^ " / - ₦ = – ( ) Ɗ Ƙ
´ 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9  ?
Q W E R T Y U I O P Ụ Ị
A S D F G H J K L Ẹ Ǝ
Z Ɓ C V B N M  ;  : Ṣ
, .

[edit] See also

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