Vai syllabary

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Vai
Type Syllabary
Spoken languages Vai
Time period 1830's - present
Parent systems Cherokee syllabary (disputed)
Vai
ISO 15924 Vaii
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
The greater part of the modern Vai syllabary. Eh and oh are the open vowels [ɛ, ɔ]. The jg on the bottom row is [ŋɡ]. Not shown are syllables beginning with g, h, w, m, n, ny, ng [ŋ], and vowels.
The greater part of the modern Vai syllabary. Eh and oh are the open vowels [ɛ, ɔ]. The jg on the bottom row is [ŋɡ]. Not shown are syllables beginning with g, h, w, m, n, ny, ng [ŋ], and vowels.

The Vai syllabary was devised by Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ of Jondu, in what is now Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia. He is regarded within the Vai community, as well as by most scholars, as the syllabary’s inventor and chief promoter when it was first documented in the 1830s.

In recent years, evidence has emerged suggesting that the Cherokee syllabary of 1819 provided a model for the design of the Vai syllabary (Tuchscherer 2002). The link appears to have been Cherokee who emigrated to Liberia. One such man, Cherokee Austin Curtis, married into a prominent Vai family and became an important Vai chief himself. It is perhaps not coincidence that the "inscription on a house" that drew the world's attention to existence of the Vai syllabary was in fact on the home of Curtis, a Cherokee.

Vai is a simple syllabic script written from left to right that represents CV syllables; a final nasal is written with the same glyph as the Vai syllabic nasal. Originally there were separate glyphs for syllables ending in a nasal, such as don, with a long vowel, such as soo, with a diphthong, such as bai, as well as bili and sεli. However, these have been dropped from the modern script.

The syllabary did not distinguish all the syllables of the Vai language until the 1960s when University of Liberia added distinctions by modifying certain glyphs with dots or extra strokes to cover all CV syllables in use. There are relatively few glyphs for nasal vowels because not only a few occur with each consonant.

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