Ajami (Arabic: عجمي, ʿajamī) or Ajamiyya (عجمية, ʿajamiyyah), is a variety of Arabic-derived scripts used for writing African languages such as Songhai, Mandé, Fula, Hausa and Swahili, although multiple other …

Dec 21, 2022 · This writing system, called Ajami, dispelled the false notion peddled by European colonialists that large swaths of communities in sub-Saharan Africa were illiterate, with no native …

Oct 26, 2025 · Manuscripts written in the Sorabé script were some of the oldest known Ajami texts from Africa to appear in Western archives. Many contain elaborate historical accounts and genealogies …

Jul 7, 2025 · Ajami is the modification of Arabic script to write African languages. It often included additional dots, marks, or character extensions to reflect sounds not found in Arabic.

Jan 19, 2023 · Anthropologist Fallou Ngom discovered Ajami, a modified Arabic script. Its existence shows that African people labeled illiterate for not writing in French were anything but.

While the left side of the panel in Roman script is monolingual and conveys information in French, the ajami side appears to depict Seereer, Wolof, French, and other languages, and in so doing, it more …

Jun 13, 2025 · In the Arabic language, Ajami means “non-Arab” or “foreigner”. Therefore, when we mention Ajami it refers solely to a specialized script used to write specific Afrikan languages. There is …

Anjẹmi or Yoruba Ajami (أَنْجَِمِ‎) refers to the tradition and practice of writing the Yoruba language using the Arabic script, as part of the tradition among Muslims of West Africa at large, referred to as …

It is an adaptation of the Arabic script to write sounds not found in Standard Arabic. Rather than adding new letters, modifications usually consist of additional dots or lines added to pre-existing letters. The …

Today, with most Arabic scholars unfamiliar with African languages and scholars fluent in African languages often unfamiliar with Arabic, thousands of documents written in the modified Arabic scripts …