Islam came into Yorubaland around the 14th century, as a result of trade with Wangara (also Wankore) merchants,[1] a mobile caste of the Soninkes from the then Mali Empire.
In these decades, the missionaries, in collaboration with the colonial government were eager to create and standardize an orthographic system for Yoruba.
The second reason was that the primary aim of the European advocates for a standard Yoruba orthography were missionaries whose goal was to detach the local population from familiarity with Islam.
[4] These aforementioned developments, while creating anxiety among Yoruba Muslims from fear of marginalization, resulted in a sharp decline in production of any books, publications, or pedagogical material in Anjẹmi.
He has so far published five primers and two posters outlining his ideas and proposals with respect to standardization and improvements to be made on Yoruba Anjẹmi.
[3] The significance of the publications by Alhaji Abubakar Yusuf lie more so in demonstrating him being a pioneer in advocating and encouraging a standardization of rules and conventions.
As will be later discussed, consonants more or less match between the two language, with only two additional letters needed to represent Yoruba sounds.
In the previously mentioned revival movement since the 1990s, one of the focuses was resolving this shortcoming of Anjẹmi by including in the agreed-upon orthographic convention, methods of representing vowels.
Table below illustrates the Yoruba Anjẹmi alphabet, the yellow highlights indicating letters that are exclusively used for writing loanwords and do not correspond to independent phonemes, 10 in total.