While they were teenagers in the late 1980s, brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry devised the alphabetic script to transcribe the Fulani language.

After looking at their drawn shapes, they would pick which ones would look the most to them like a good glyph for a letter, and associate it with whatever sound they felt it would represent.

[7] After several years of development it began to be widely adopted among Fulani communities, and is currently taught not only regionally in Guinea, Nigeria, and Liberia but even as far as Europe and North America.

Usage of the consonant modifier: Usage of the dot to represent sounds borrowed from Arabic: Use of the dot with native letters: Unlike the Arabic script, Adlam digits go in the same direction (right to left) as letters, as in the N'Ko script.

[12][better source needed] The shape of the initial marks changed in 2019 as part of the efforts for Unicode standardization.