Greater than a mere assortment of phrases, language offers a singular perspective of the world. Every time one disappears, so does its manner of seeing issues.
When contemplating that specialists worry 90% of languages across the globe might vanish over the subsequent century, that’s lots of viewpoints to lose.
Within the Effie Award-winning marketing campaign “ADLaM: An Alphabet to Preserve a Culture,” McCann New York revealed how Microsoft labored with the Fulani individuals of West Africa to maintain their language—and, subsequently, their knowledge, creativity, and historical past—alive within the digital period.
The issue
Though round 60 million Fulani individuals talk via their native tongue of Pulaar, the language hasn’t had an alphabet for almost all of its existence. The one manner to make use of it was to talk it.
This modified within the late Eighties, when two Fulani brothers, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry, started making a Pulaar alphabet. They devoted themselves to the duty, filling notebooks with shapes and symbols. Typically they closed their eyes and tried to attract new characters based mostly on sound alone.
Finally, the brothers settled on a 28-letter system that’s develop into generally known as ADLaM, an acronym that includes the alphabet’s first 4 characters that stands for Alkule Dandayɗe Leñol Mulugol, or “the alphabet that protects the people from vanishing.”
Regardless of the key achievement, ADLaM remained confined to pen and paper. The one manner to make use of it was to jot down it by hand. This meant Pulaar audio system needed to depend on one other language for expressing themselves via e mail, textual content messages, and social media. If the Fulani individuals wished to take part in enterprise and conversations occurring on digital channels, they needed to depart their phrases behind.
The answer
In 2019, on the Barry brothers’ request, Microsoft acquired concerned. Working alongside the brothers and Fulani group at massive, the tech firm started honing every ADLaM character.
