West African Ajami systems

Ajami was the language of scholarship in Kanem Borno, through which religious knowledge is imparted to students. Therefore, Ajamization was in place even before the coming of the Europeans to the Kanem land. Ajami is not used for language of scholarship and skill acquisition only but it serves enormous roles in adult education, political education as well as mass literacy in general. It also serves as a medium for integration of Qur’anic (Sangaya) education into formal western type of education. So that product of Qur’anic education can be elected into various political offices. They too can contribute in political administration and governance of their nations. Against this backdrop, this paper reviews various Ajami writing system among the Kanuri speaking communities with a view to harmonise the divergent spellings and writing practices.

West Africans throughout the region have creatively adapted the Arabic script to write non-Arabic languages, a form of literacy known as Ajami which remains widespread today despite little or no government support. The variety of methods used to extend the Arabic script to fit other phonological systems are of particular interest: methods that appear unmotivated from a purely linguistic perspective can readily be explained as rational adaptations to the parallel educational system in which Ajami is typically learned, an issue often not taken into account in orthography planning.

The scribes of the Old Kanembu glosses did not invent new Arabic-script based graphemes to represent native sounds but rather adapted the available graphic inventory of Arabic script. In adapting the inventory, the scribes created a rather elaborate system for encoding vowels and tones, sufficient enough to be recognizable by the readers of their texts more than three hundred years later. The consonant graphemes were however used ‘prudently’ and received more underspecified readings. Graphemic underspecification in itself is common in almost any writing system, and whereas it does not constitute a problem for the ‘internal’ users, it does create an analytical challenge for the ‘decipherers’ when the language is no longer spoken. On a set of the most ambiguous graphemes, the paper demonstrates how this kind of challenge can be dealt with and what phonological inferences can be drawn from an underspecified writing system such as Old Kanembu Ajami.
The asymmetry in vowel and consonant representation may be explained by the function of Old Kanembu as a recitational language used alongside with the recitation of the Qurʾān. The vowels are sonority peaks, which gain prominence within phonological units, and this prominence is ever more salient in recited texts. It was possibly due to this factor that the scribes applied a more specified graphemic encoding to the vowels than to the consonants.

The Kanuri and Hausa manuscript cultures had a standard model of the Arabic writing system whose uniformity is grounded in Arabic literacy in its Qur'anic and Classical forms. The scribes of both cultures (Kanuri starting from the mid-17 th century and Hausa from the early 19 th century) adhered to the principle of total orthographic uniformity in writing the Arabic texts but they used variable orthographic systems for writing in local languages (Ajami). Having been in contact for a long time, Kanuri and Hausa manuscript cultures share a similar type of Arabic script and belong to the Central Sudanic area of Ajami writing cha-racterised by specific graphemic choices for some sounds. Both Kanuri and Hausa orthographies developed from conservative simplified systems strictly modelled on Arabic letters to a more elaborated encoding of sounds. However, unlike Hausa writing of a later period, Kanuri tradition remained largely unaffected by graphemic innovation. Both cultures have identifiable sets of grapheme-phoneme combinations which were stable within a restrictive range of the phonemic and graphemic inventories. From a diachronic perspective, Hausa writing shows a tendency towards a closer match between the number of phonemes and graphemes, whereas in Kanuri there is a tendency of the retention of the spelling of some high-frequency lexical and grammatical items.

This paper is part of the research project 'The Pan-Arab Hangover', which focuses on the lingering ruins of Arab nationalism and how it plays out in the region's contemporary cultural production. It looks at Arabism's parent ideologies-notably German romanticism and idealism-and how 'unified Arabism' in art, culture, and writing is held up as a potential 'cure' to the region's problems. The research's larger objective is to dismantle constructions of Arabism, and to locate identities erased by Arab-Islamic supremacy, such as Afro-Arabness to minority resistances (Kurdish/Amazigh) and Ajami histories. Under this, we found the word kaffir, or Kaffirism, popping up in strange and seemingly unrelated ways: in the Arabian Peninsula in the ninth century, in Southern Africa from about the fourteenth century, and in Sri Lanka.

Manuscripts in Arabic and ʿAjamī have proven to be abundant in sub-Saharan Africa despite the misguided but persisting idea about supposed “illiteracy” and “orality” of the continent. These manuscripts emerged due to the expansion of Islam from the eighth century onward, but the literacy in Arabic language was confined to a more specialized religious, political and trading elites. The ʿAjamī, on the other hand, has been a more democratic and widespread phenomenon. The trade was a vehicle for Islamization as literacy in East and West Africa, two regions that were deeply entrenched in the Indian Ocean and Trans-Saharan trading networks respectively. These networks were dominated by Muslims from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. The
Qurʾānic schools provided skills necessary for conducting trade and for transcribing local languages into ʿAjamī using the Arabic script. The European missionaries and colonial officials laid the ground for the contemporary manuscript collections in various libraries and archives of Europe and Africa. After the independence of the continent, the localization and identification of the manuscripts intensified, which paved the way for the emergence of the new libraries and archives. This process has stimulated the development of the innovative and vibrant scholarship, reflecting the agency, creativity and intellectual traditions of sub-Saharan Muslim Africa more powerfully than ever before.

Ajami (عجمي) is a term frequently used to refer to the use of the Arabic script to write sub-Saharan African languages. West African lingua francas such as Hausa, Wolof, and Fulani have a rather well-documented record of Ajami artifacts and use. In Eastern Manding varieties such as Bamanan and Jula, however, Ajami practices and texts have been viewed as rather limited in comparison. Recent 2012 fieldwork in Burkina Faso however suggests that Ajami practices in Jula have simply escaped the notice of the Western scholarly community. Drawing on ethnographic fieldnotes about production of Esoteric Islamic medicinal treatment recipes in addition to dialogues, descriptions and songs produced at my request, I explore Jula Ajami as a grassroots literacy existing alongside the Koranic schooling tradition. Turning to the texts themselves, I analyze the graphic system in use as well as the linguistic characteristics that suggest the enregisterment of Kong Jula as appropriate in Jula Ajami texts.

This article examines the transcription choices and social purposes involved in the writing of non-Arabic local languages ("Shelha") in southwestern Algeria, including several Berber varieties and Korandjé, in the Arabic script, mainly online.  Examination of the transcription choices suggests that 'Ajami' writing is a natural side effect of Arabic literacy, which can show significant homogeneity across individuals and languages without the practice itself ever having been institutionally taught. The contexts and purposes of the examples confirm that, in public contexts, Arabic remains the default choice, with 'Shelha' reserved almost exclusively for presenting language-specific form rather than translatable meaning; in private messages, however, 'Shelha' may still be used to emphasise solidarity, paralleling its oral sociolinguistic status.