Wadaad's writing

[7] This is a continuation of the long history of interchange between the peninsulas—Sabaic inscriptions exist in abundance in Northern Somalia alongside Christian graves.

In much the same way that Islam and Arabic entered the Horn of Africa, Christianity and Sabaic had shared similar roles previously.

[11][5] With the official adoption of Latin Alphabet in 1972, the process of standardization of orthography of Somali Arabic script came to a halt.

[16] Sheikh Abi-Bakr Al Alawi, a Harari historian, states in his book that Yusuf bin Ahmad al-Kawneyn was of native and local Dir extraction.

Al-Barawi modeled his alphabet after the Arabic transcription adopted by the Amrani of Barawa (Brava) to also write the Swahili dialect, Bravanese.

[18][19] Wadaad's writing was often unintelligible to Somali pupils who learned standard Arabic in government-run schools.

[20] During the 1930s in the northwestern British Somaliland protectorate, Mahammad 'Abdi Makaahiil attempted to standardize the orthography in his book The Institution of Modern Correspondence in the Somali language.

Ibraahim 'Abdallah Mayal, Makaahiil therein championed the use of the Arabic script for writing Somali, showing examples of this usage through proverbs, letters and sentences.

Though, beginning in the 20th century, a systematic process of "Swahilization" of the Arabic script has been under way by Swahili scribes and scholars.

An early attempt was done by Mwalimu Sikujua, a scholar and poet from Mombasa, who built upon the centuries of Arabic script use in the region.

Galaal's goal was to eliminate the need to use diacritics and also to provide easy to write and read distinction between short vowels and long.

[5] He had published his work in the Islamic Quarterly, outlining and providing examples as to why a new Arabic based script was needed for use in Somalia.

On the other hand, there are 8 consonants in Arabic alphabet that do not exist in Somali language (except for writing Arabic loanwords), which include the letters thāʼ (ث), dhal (ذ), zāy (ز), ṣād (ص), ḍād (ض), ṭāʾ (ط), ẓāʾ (ظ), and ghayn (غ).

For long vowel sounds [a:], [u:], and [i:], similar to Arabic, the letters alif (ا), wāw (و), and yāʾ (ي) respectively.

پا چا‎ ݝا غيڠ ٛ The additional vowel never appears in the long form, and often isn't needed for legibility.

For example, barwaaqo, is often rendered as barwaaghy, in Maay to further specify the vowel quality and stress differences from standard Somali.