It was developed by a number of leading scholars of Somali, including Musa Haji Ismail Galal, B. W. Andrzejewski and Shire Jama Ahmed specifically for transcribing the Somali language, and is based on the Latin script.

There are no diacritics or other special characters, although it includes three consonant digraphs: DH, KH and SH.

Tone is not marked and a word-initial glottal stop is also not shown.

As there is no central regulation of the language, there is some variation in orthography, the endings -ay and -ey being particularly interchangeable.

The Somali alphabet lacks equivalents of the Arabic letters thāʼ (ث), dhal (ذ), zāy (ز), ṣād (ص), ḍād (ض), ṭāʾ (ط), ẓāʾ (ظ), and ghayn (غ).