Vai Language - Writing System

Writing System

Vai is noteworthy for being one of the few sub-Saharan African languages to have a writing system that is not based on the Latin script. This Vai script is a syllabary invented by Momolu Duwalu Bukele around 1833, although dates as early as 1815 have been alleged. The existence of Vai was reported in 1834 by American missionaries in the Missionary Herald of the ABCFM and independently by Rev. Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle, a Sierra Leone agent of the Church Mission Society of London.

The Vai script was used to print the New Testament in the Vai language, dedicated in 2003.

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