The Latin script was introduced to Fula-speaking regions of West and Central Africa by Europeans during, and in some cases immediately before, invasion.
One issue similar to other efforts by Europeans to use their alphabet and home orthographic conventions was how to write African languages with unfamiliar sounds.
In the case of Fula, these included how to represent sounds such as the implosive b and d, the ejective y, the velar n (the latter being present in European languages, but never in initial position), prenasalised consonants, and long vowels, all of which can change meaning.
Major influences on the current forms used for writing Fula were decisions made by colonial administrators in Northern Nigeria and the Africa Alphabet.
Post independence African governments decided to retain the Latin alphabet as the basis for transcribing their languages.
Various writers in Fula, such as Amadou Hampate Ba and Alfa Ibrahim Sow, wrote and published in this script.
Major UNESCO-sponsored conferences on harmonising Latin-based African language orthographies in Bamako in 1966 and Niamey in 1978 confirmed standards for writing Fula.
A common Latin alphabet is used in Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso is used for writing of Fulfulde dialects in this region.
In recent decades, albeit at a slower pace than Fula Latin orthography, there has been conferences, seminars, and attempts by linguists and literaturists in various countries to standardize the Arabic (Ajami) script.
During the late 1980s an alphabetic script was devised by the teenaged brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry, in order to represent the Fulani language.
[21][22] After several years of development it started to be widely adopted among Fulani communities, and is currently taught in Guinea, Nigeria, Liberia and other nearby countries.
Dita was influenced by the traditional iconography of various Malian communities, while Ba's system is a cursive script which Dalby compares to the handwritten Latin alphabet.
Both scripts were alphabetic in nature, and in the face of disapproval from officials who favored the promotion of Latin-script literacy, neither had seen widespread adoption as of 1969.