How it began
In 1989 the brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry, aged 14 and 10, set out to invent an alphabet for their language in their family home in Nzérékoré, Guinea. They shut themselves in their room, closed their eyes and drew shapes on paper, then chose the shapes they liked and matched each to a sound. The name is an acronym from the first four letters, A, D, L and M, and stands for a phrase meaning the alphabet that protects the peoples from vanishing.
Before it existed
Fulfulde, also called Fula, Pular or Fulani, is spoken by more than 40 million people in about 20 African countries but had no script of its own. People wrote it in Arabic and sometimes Latin letters. Many of its sounds exist in neither, so writers improvised, and letters were hard to read. The brothers' father, who knew Arabic, deciphered such letters for friends and relatives, and the boys helped him.
How it works
The brothers developed an alphabet of 28 letters and 10 numerals, written from right to left. They later added six letters for sounds in other African languages and in borrowed words. Each letter stands for one sound of the language, including the sounds that Arabic and Latin letters could not show.
How it spread
They taught their younger sister first, then people at local markets, asking each learner to teach at least three more. They copied out books and wrote pamphlets on subjects such as infant care and water filtration. At university in Conakry they founded a group called Winden Jangen. A palm oil trader carried the script to Senegal, Gambia and Sierra Leone, and other learners took it to Nigeria and Ghana. It is now taught in Guinea, Nigeria and Liberia and among Fulani communities in Europe and North America.
Who pushed back
Some people objected to the spread of ADLaM, saying the Fulani should learn French, English or Arabic instead. In 2002 military officers raided a Winden Jangen meeting, arrested Ibrahima Barry and held him for three months. According to his brother he was never charged or told why. Early inquiries about encoding the script in Unicode went unanswered, and a font layered on top of Arabic displayed as random letters on other computers.
Where it stands today
After moving to Portland, Oregon, the brothers worked with type designers and software companies to bring the script to computers. Windows has supported it natively since version 1903 of Windows 10 in May 2019, Android and Chrome OS support it, and macOS added it in 2022. The letter shapes were refined in 2019 after years of practical use.
