How it began
Sheikh Hussein Sheikh Ahmed Kaddare, a Sufi sheikh of the Abgaal Hawiye clan, invented the alphabet in 1952 as a way to write Somali. It bears his name. The sources consulted do not record the town where he worked. It was the third well-known script devised for the language in the 20th century, after Osmanya in the early 1920s and the Borama script in 1933.
Before it existed
Somali had long been written in the Arabic script, introduced in the 13th century for Quranic teaching and adapted for the language in the 19th century. In the 1950s the linguist Muuse Xaaji Ismaaciil Galaal altered the spelling conventions for Somali in Arabic letters and added new symbols for vowels. Latin spellings were also in circulation, and no single system had official standing.
How it works
Kaddare is an alphabet in which each letter has two forms, an upper case and a lower case. Much about its practical use is uncertain: the researcher whose chart of the letters is most often reproduced has said he is unsure how the alphabet was used, and there are no known books written in it.
Who pushed back
After independence the Somali Language Committee was asked in 1961 to recommend a script for the nation. It appraised Kaddare as the most accurate indigenous script for transcribing Somali and found it satisfactory. The committee nevertheless judged an indigenous script impractical for a developing country, and economic constraints told against it.
What lasted
In October 1972 a Latin alphabet for Somali, credited to Shire Jama Ahmed, was adopted as the official writing system. It was chosen from among eighteen competing orthographies, partly because typewriters and printing machines for Latin letters already existed. The Kaddare script remained little known, but it stands as a record of the mid-century search for a Somali way of writing.
