1982 Version
The 1982 revision of the alphabet was made by Michael Mann and David Dalby, who had attended the Niamey conference. It has 56 letters, a number of which are quite different from the 1978 version. Another key feature of this alphabet is that it included only lower-case letters (making it a unicase alphabet).
The proposal also included ten diacritics: acute accent ( ´ ), grave accent ( ` ), circumflex ( ^ ), caron ( ˇ ), macron ( ¯ ) to mark tone, a tilde ( ˜ ) to mark nasalization, a subscript dot ( . ), and an underline mark ( _ ). The trema ( ¨ ) was used for some vowels.
A typewriter keyboard was proposed as well: for the additional characters, the uppercase letters had to be given up. It was probably for this reason that the keyboard did not get used. However, the proposal of the additional characters is valuable as it reflects the needs for writing African languages. On the other hand, in quite a few orthographical systems of African languages, two-letter combinations are used for representing additional sounds.
| a | ɑ | ʌ | b | ɓ | c | ƈ | ç | d | ɗ | ɖ | đ | e | ɛ | ǝ |
| f | ƒ | g | ɠ | ɣ | h | ɦ | i | ɩ | j | ɟ | k | ƙ | l | λ |
| m | n | ɴ | ŋ | ɲ | o | ɔ | p | ƥ | q | r | ɽ | s | ʃ | t |
| ƭ | ʈ | ɵ | u | ω | v | ʋ | w | x | y | ƴ | z | ʒ | ƹ | ʔ |
Read more about this topic: African Reference Alphabet
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