How it began
Sheikh Abdurahman Sheikh Nuur devised the alphabet in 1933 in Borama, a town in the Awdal region in the northwest of Somalia, in the area of the self-declared Republic of Somaliland. He was a Quranic teacher, the son of the town's qadi, or judge, and a member of the Gadabuursi clan, which gives the script its other name.
Before it existed
Somali was written, when it was written at all, in Arabic letters, a practice dating from the 13th century and reworked in the 19th century. The Osmanya alphabet had been created about a decade earlier in Hobyo, far to the southeast. Sheikh Nuur's alphabet was a separate local attempt to give Somali an orthography of its own.
How it works
The script is an alphabet, with letters for consonants and vowels, and it is described as a quite accurate phonetic writing system for Somali. Sheikh Nuur trained his students in it. A surviving sample is a family letter with news of a camel killed by a lion, goods received, a request for ghee and a brother's journey to Hargeisa, which shows the everyday use to which it was put.
How it spread
Use stayed local. The alphabet was employed mainly by Sheikh Nuur, his circle of associates in Borama and some of the merchants who controlled trade in Zeila and Borama. Though less widely known than Osmanya, it produced a notable body of literature, consisting mainly of qasidas, a form of poem.
Who pushed back
In 1961 the script was submitted to the Somali Language Committee, which had been set up to choose a writing system for the newly independent country. The committee considered it unsatisfactory. Somalia adopted a Latin alphabet for Somali in 1972, and the Borama script did not come into wider use.
