Zaghawa script



The Zaghawa script, also called the Beria script, or camel alphabet, is an alphabet created to write Zaghawa (also known as Beria). It is natively known as Beria Giray Erfe ('Zaghawa Writing Marks').

Usage
The alphabet has 24 letters. There are uppercase and lowercase forms for the letters. The capital letters drop below the baseline of the lower-case letters and punctuation, which is opposed to many other scripts, where capital letters which rise above lower-case letters. Diacritics are used to mark tone and advanced tongue root vowels. A grave accent for falling tone and acute accent for rising tone. High, mid, and low tone are unmarked. The letters for /ɪ ɛ a ɔ ʊ/ can be written with a macron to get their advanced tongue root versions (/i e ə o u/).

The letter for /p/ is used for loanwords, as the sound does not appear in Zaghawa. In some descriptions Zaghawa is said to have the sound /ħ/, though it does not appear in the writing system. The sounds /ɾ/ and /r/ have also been claimed to be distinct in Zaghawa, though the phonemic status in unclear and they are not distinguished in the writing system.

European numerals and punctuation are used.

History
The script was created in the 1950s by a Sudanese Zaghawa school teacher named Adam Tajir. The symbols were derived from the clan brands used for camels and other livestock. He copied the phonemic inventory of the Arabic script, so the system was not ideal for Zaghawa. In 2000, a Zaghawa veterinarian named Siddick Adam Issa adapted the script to better suit the Zaghawa language.

There are resources to learn the script, though it is unclear how commonly the script is actually used to write the language.

Digital usage
The script is not in Unicode, though there was a preliminary Unicode proposal in 2008. A non-unicode font has been created for the script.