Furthermore, Wolofal orthography has been standardized in 1990 by Direction de la Promotion des Langues Nationales (DPLN) (now known as Direction de l'alphabétisation des langues nationales), an initiative of Senegal's Ministry of Education as part of a harmonized national "Arabic script".

This "harmonized script is used for Wolof, Pulaar, Soninke, Mandinka, Seereer, Joola, and Balant.

The reason for this is that standardization of writing in Ajami script in West Africa is supposed to be a multi-national effort.

In order to represent sounds in Wolof that are not present in Arabic, letters as well as diacritics have been created.

Historically, there was different conventions among different writers and schools, but one of the aims and achievements of the push for standardization by the Senegalese Ministry of Education has been to agree upon a unified set of letters.

Similar to Arabic, long vowels are indicated by writing alif (ا), waw (و), or yeh (ي).

An alif (ا) is used as the carrier of the vowel, followed by either waw (و) or yeh (ي) as appropriate.

Native Wolof speakers pronounce geminated nouns not as doubles but simply longer.

The letter meem (م) appears in pairs with beh (ب) or peh (ݒ), whereas the letter noon (ن) appears in pairs with teh (ت), ceh (ݖ‎), dal (د), jeem (ج), qaf (ق), kaf (ک), and geh (گ).

Some digraphs cannot appear at the beginning of words, -mp (مݒ), -nc (نݖ), -nq (نق).