The script has a few similarities to the Arabic script, notably its direction (right-to-left) and the letters that are connected at the base. Unlike Arabic, it is obligatory to mark both tone and vowels. NKo tones are marked as diacritics.
Grave of Solomana Kanté. The French at the bottom reads "Inventor of the N'Ko alphabet".
Kanté created NKo in response to erroneous beliefs that no indigenous African writing system existed, as well as to provide a better way to write Manding languages, which had for centuries been written predominantly in Ajami script, which was not perfectly suited to the tones unique to Mandé and common to many West African languages. A widely told story among NKo proponents is that Kanté was particularly challenged to create a distinct system when he, in Bouake, stumbled upon a book by a Lebanese author who dismissively equated African languages "like those of the birds, impossible to transcribe"[3] despite said Ajami history.[4] Kanté devised NKo as he was in Bingerville, Côte d'Ivoire and later brought to Kanté's natal region of Kankan, Guinea.[5]
NKo began to be used in many educational books when the script is believed to have been finalized[6] on April 14, 1949 (now NKo Alphabet Day);[7] Kanté had transcribed from religious to scientific and philosophical literature, even a dictionary.[8] These materials were given as gifts into other Manding-speaking parts of West Africa. The script received its first specially made typewriter from Eastern Europe back when Guinea had ties with the Soviet Union in the 1950s.[9]
The introduction of the script led to a movement promoting literacy in NKo among Mandé speakers in both Anglophone and Francophone West Africa. NKo literacy was instrumental in shaping the Maninka cultural identity in Guinea, and it has also strengthened the Manding identity in other parts of West Africa.[10]
As of 2005, it was used mainly in Guinea and the Ivory Coast (respectively by Maninka and Dyula speakers), with an active user community in Mali (byBambara speakers). Publications include a translation of the Quran, a variety of textbooks on subjects such as physics and geography, poetic and philosophical works, descriptions of traditional medicine, a dictionary, and several local newspapers. Though taught mostly informally through NKo literacy promotion associations, NKo has also been introduced more recently into formal education through private primary schools in Upper Guinea.[11] It has been classed as the most successful of the West African scripts.[12]
NKo literature generally uses a literary language register, termed kangbe (literally, 'clear language'), that is seen as a potential compromise dialect across Mandé languages.[13] For example, the word for 'name' in Bamanan is tɔgɔ and in Maninka it is tɔɔ. NKo has only one written word for 'name', but individuals read and pronounce the word in their own language. This literary register is thus intended as a koiné language blending elements of the principal Manding languages, which are mutually intelligible, but has a very strong Maninka influence.
There has also been documented use of NKo, with additional diacritics, for traditional religious publications in the Yoruba and Fon languages of Benin and southwestern Nigeria.[14]
NKo uses 7 diacritical marks to denote tonality and vowel length. Together with plain vowels, NKo distinguishes four tones: high, low, ascending, and descending; and two vowel lengths: long and short. Unmarked signs designate short, descending vowels.
NKo also provides a way of representing non-native sounds through the modification of its letters with diacritics.[15][16] These letters are used in transliterated names and loanwords.
Two dots above a vowel, resembling a diaeresis or umlaut mark, represent a foreign vowel: u-two-dots for the French /y/ sound, or e-two-dots for the French /ə/.
Diacritics are also placed above some consonant letters to cover sounds not found in Mandé, such as gb-dot for /g/; gb-line for /ɣ/; gb-two-dots for /k͡p/; f-dot for /v/; rr-dot for /ʁ/; etc.
With the increasing use of computers and the subsequent desire to provide universal access to information technology, the challenge arose of developing ways to use the NKo script on computers. From the 1990s onwards, there were efforts to develop fonts and even web content by adapting other software and fonts. A DOS word processor named Koma Kuda was developed by Prof. Baba Mamadi Diané from Cairo University.[18] However the lack of intercompatibility inherent in such solutions was a block to further development.
The NKo script was added to the Unicode Standard in July 2006 with the release of version 5.0. Additional characters were added in 2018.
UNESCO's Programme Initiative B@bel supported preparing a proposal to encode NKo in Unicode. In 2004, the proposal, presented by three professors of NKo (Baba Mamadi Diané, Mamady Doumbouya, and Karamo Kaba Jammeh) working with Michael Everson, was approved for balloting by the ISO working group WG2. In 2006, NKo was approved for Unicode 5.0. The Unicode block for NKo is U+07C0–U+07FF:
^Oyler, Dianne White (January 1997). "The N'ko Alphabet as a Vehicle of Indigenist Historiography". History in Africa. 24: 239–256. doi:10.2307/3172028.
^Oyler, Dianne White (November 2005). The History of N'ko and its Role in Mande Transnational Identity: Words as Weapons. Africana Homestead Legacy Publishers. p. 1. ISBN978-0-9653308-7-9.
^• "N'Ko Alphabet Day". Any Day Guide. N'Ko Alphabet Day is celebrated on April 14 in some West African countries, where the Manding languages are spoken. It marks the anniversary of the date the alphabet is believed to have been finalized. • Garikayi, Tapiwanashe S. "Afrikan Fonts: The N'Ko Alphabet". nan.xyz. N'Ko started to be utilized in numerous instructive books when the script is believed to have been finalized on April 14, 1949 (presently N'Ko Alphabet Day)....
^Oyler, Dianne White (1994) Mande identity through literacy, the N'ko writing system as an agent of cultural nationalism. Toronto: African Studies Association.
^Wyrod, Christopher (January 2008). "A social orthography of identity: the NKo literacy movement in West Africa". International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 2008 (192). doi:10.1515/ijsl.2008.033. ISSN0165-2516. S2CID143142019.
Conrad, David C. (2001). "Reconstructing Oral Tradition: Souleymane Kanté's Approach to Writing Mande History". Mande Studies. 3: 147–200.
Dalby, David (1969). "Further indigenous scripts of West Africa: Mandin, Wolof and Fula alphabets and Yoruba 'Holy' writing". African Language Studies. 10: 161–181.
Donaldson, Coleman (2019). "Linguistic and Civic Refinement in the N'ko Movement of Manding-Speaking West Africa". Signs and Society. 7 (2): 156–185. doi:10.1086/702554. S2CID181625415.
Oyler, Dianne White (1994). Mande identity through literacy, the N'ko writing system as an agent of cultural nationalism. Toronto: African Studies Association.
Oyler, Dianne (1995), For "All Those Who Say N'ko": N'ko Literacy and Mande Cultural Nationalism in the Republic of Guinea, Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Florida
Rovenchak, Andrij (2015). Arjuna Tuzzi; Martina Benešová; Ján Macutek (eds.). "Quantitative Studies in the Corpus of Nko Periodicals". Recent Contributions to Quantitative Linguistics. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter: 125–138.
Singler, John Victor (1996). "Scripts of West Africa". In Daniels, Peter T.; Bright, William (eds.). The World's Writing Systems. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc. pp. 593–598.
Vydrine, Valentin F (2001).『Souleymane Kanté, un philosophe-innovateur traditionnaliste maninka vu à travers ses écrits en nko』[Solomana Kante, a Maninka traditionalist philosopher-innovator seen through his writings in N'Ko]. Mande Studies (in French). 3: 99–131.
Wyrod, Christopher (2003), The light on the horizon: N'Ko literacy and formal schooling in Guinea, MA thesis, George Washington University
"Bambara". Encyclopedia Britannica. 2000. The Bambara, like other West African peoples, use the distinctive N'ko alphabet, which reads from right to left.
"N'Ko Alphabet". N'Ko Institute of America. Retrieved 2023-04-10.
