African Reference Alphabet

Two variants of the initial proposal (one in English and a second in French) were made at a 1978 UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger.

They were based on the results of several earlier conferences on the harmonization of established Latin alphabets of individual languages.

Since then, continent-wide harmonization has been largely abandoned, because regional needs, practices and thus preferences differ greatly across Africa.

The Niamey conference built on the work of a previous UNESCO-organized meeting, on harmonizing the transcriptions of African languages, that was held in Bamako, Mali, in 1966.

Some (the uppercase letters alpha, eth (), esh, and both lower- and upper-case , ) cannot be accurately represented in Unicode (as of version 15, 2023).

Notes: A proposed revision of the alphabet was made in 1982 by Michael Mann and David Dalby, who had attended the Niamey conference.

⟨ꞇ⟩, inspired by the shape of Insular t, is meant to complete the series ejective letters with hook ⟨ƥ, ƭ, ꞇ, ƙ⟩, in practice ⟨ƈ⟩ is used instead.

For instance, ɦ may be a voiceless pharyngeal, a voiced glottal fricative, or even (in the Khoekhoe table) an alveolar nasal click to avoid the digraph ɖɴ.