[1] Ajami is a name commonly given to alphabets derived from Arabic script for the use of various African languages, from Swahili to Hausa, Fulfulde, and Wolof.
Hausa ajami is an alphabet where vowel sounds are written using a mixture of combining marks and letters.
While technically such distinction between Sufis and Sunnis does not theologically exist, this is a good approximation of the sociolinguistic situation.
Prior to independence, British West African pound banknotes included Hausa text written in Hafs script.
Originally, 'Ajami' referred to non-Arab language in Africa, as it did elsewhere in the Muslim world too, with Persian, Turkish, Malay, Spanish, etc.
But, it was in colonial Northern Nigeria that the earlier notion of 'Ajami language' (Hausa, Fulfulde) was misinterpreted and transformed into 'Ajami script'.
[1] Over time, this misrepresentation by European Christian missionaries, colonial officials, and Africologists, was adopted by native Hausa-speaking scholars as well.
[1] Hausa Ajamī, the use of Arabic alphabet for non-Arabic language writing, has been developed as a form of discourse by Islamic clerics in Hausa city states since the large-scale introduction of Islam in the region through Malian cleric merchants in the 14th century.
[5][1] Pre-colonial Hausa writings in Arabic script have been described as mostly Islamic literature, usually in verse as opposed to 'essentially un-Islamic' oral prose, as well as some historical chronicles, folktales, official and private correspondence.
One variety of Hausa Ajami may be described as Western or Sokoto-centred and close to the written traditions of the Central Niger region.
Another variety, based in Kano, which looks like an offshoot of the venerable centuries-old tradition of Borno (Kanuri language) Ajami.
[6] British and German colonization of West Africa, and specifically encroachment of Christian missionaries, coinciding with the Fula jihads and the literary boom brought by the consolidation of the Sokoto Caliphate, resulted in the start of a 'golden age of Ajami', during which Arabic-script Hausa writings were 'flourishing in the 19th century and continuing into the 20th', prior to the decision of the British colonial authorities to romanize the Hausa language in 1930.
On the one hand, Islamic scholars and local rulers relied ever so greatly on Arabic-script Hausa to communicate and to express literature.
And thirdly, missionaries thought that using Ajami to write and communicate in the local language would best facilitate the spread of their work and would best connect them with the Hausa populous.
[1] Despite the disillusionment of bureaucrats, both colonial and post-independence natives, and despite the spread of Latin alphabet through secular education, Christian missionaries have remained interested in Ajami script as one of the ways to communicate in Hausa.
[1][7] As Hausa Ajami script was never recognized and regulated officially, there has never been a top down imposition of a unified convention.
For example, whereas previously in writing, sounds [b] and [ɓ] may have usually been written with a single character ba 'ب', it was the innovation of introducing the separate letter in Latin alphabet that created an impetus for scholars writing in Ajami script, to innovate and introduce a separate Ajami letter for the distinct sound as well.
Beige highlight marks letters that are only used for writing of loan words of Arabic or European origin.
At best, such a failure may suggest to the Hausa listener that the subject is either a novice in the language or is a victim of speech defect.
Some languages in West Africa, especially in Western Sahel, do have a distinction, where the vowel [o] is marked with an inverted damma, but this is not the case in Hausa.
In Warsh, there are instnaces where, based on Old Arabic, the vowel [a] is raised and moved to the front, and is pronounced approximately as an [e].