Three small dots

A 2009 article described census takers in Niger counting as readers only the people who could read French. Many of those left out read every day, in a script the count never asked about.

A 2009 article in Boston University's magazine describes census takers in Niger going from village to village, counting the people who can read and write French. It reports the same kind of count in Senegal and in Guinea. Villagers who read Ajami, the article notes, would not be counted, and so on paper they would join the people who cannot read.

Ajami is the name for African languages written in Arabic letters. Hausa has been written this way for centuries, far longer than it has been written in the Latin alphabet that schools teach today. Look closely at a page of Hausa in Ajami and you will find letters with three small dots above them, smaller than the usual ones. The mark is called the wagaf. It marks the Hausa sounds that Arabic has no letter for, among them ɓ, ts and ƴ.

People wrote ordinary things this way. Scholars at Boston University describe Ajami documents that record a loan for a horse, and others that set down remedies for snakebite and stomach ache, alongside love poems and folktales. One of them, Fallou Ngom, argues that official literacy figures miss these readers. As he describes it, the usual definitions count people who read Arabic, or a European language, or an African language in Latin letters, and a person who reads Hausa in Arabic letters fits none of those boxes. Scholars disagree about how many Ajami readers there are, and the percentages that get quoted are disputed.

These readers are not new. The poet Nana Asmaʼu, who lived from 1793 to 1864, chose to write in Hausa and in Fulfulde, in Ajami, and she founded the Ƴan Taru, a circle of women teachers. Her own manuscripts are still kept in Sokoto. In Niamey, the IRSH, the human sciences research institute of Université Abdou Moumouni, holds more than 3,000 manuscripts, some of them in Hausa and Tamajaq written in Ajami. It is said that the Hausa newspaper Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo, "truth is worth more than a penny", printed in Latin letters since it began in 1939, added pages in Ajami in 1941 for readers who could not read the Latin script. It called them Ƴar Gaskiya, "daughter of truth".

The question in those villages was about French, so the three small dots never came into it. Counts like that one travel a long way. They go into reports, and the reports are read by the people who decide what gets built, a health campaign or a phone service. If the figure says few people can read, the service is designed for the readers it counted, in their script, and everyone else enters the plan as a gap to be closed later. Much of the technology people meet today was made for that counted reader. It expects them to read menus and type their questions, often in a language other than the one they speak at home.

Speech was there the whole time. A person who reads Ajami and a person who reads no script at all speak the same Hausa, and they can ask the same question out loud, in the same words. When technology starts from speech, nobody has to decide first which script counts, and nobody has to become someone else before they can use it. A person can ask the way they would ask a neighbour, in the language they think in. At Namu we build speech AI for the languages of the Sahel, starting with Hausa, with Zarma next, so that people can use technology by speaking, in their own language.

Some Ajami manuscripts carry small notes in their margins, written in a thin, even line, perhaps with a ballpoint pen. A computer font has been drawn, loosely, from that handwriting. The Manga of Niger write in the same style, and the font is named Ruwudu, which is the Manga word for writing.