Use of Arabic in West Africa
- How the Arabic script and language was used as a literary language in West Africa
Use of Ajami in West Africa
- How the Ajami script (modified Arabic) was used to write native languages in West Africa
Indigenous Scripts of West Africa
- The Use of Pre-Colonial and Post-Colonial alphabets to write native languages of West Africa

West Africa has always been one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the world, from the Atlantic coast to the Sahel it is home to hundreds of distinct languages belonging to multiple major families such as the Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic, and Nilo-Saharan. Before colonial times, these languages flourished in a web of kingdoms, empires, trade networks, city states, etc... where multilingualism was common and oral traditions played a central role in preserving knowledge and law.

Prior to the widespread use of writing, much of West Africa's intellectual and cultural life was oral. Through griots, which were court historians, poets, and musicians, West Africa maintained a tradition of geneaologies, epic poems, and wisom across generations. These were often accompanied by symbols, drums, pictoral markings that acted as mnemonic or communicative decies, some of the oldest writing in West Africa was developed independently as ideographic markings for secret societies, showing that literacy took multiple forms before script-based writing.

The arrival and spread of Islam from the 10th century onwards introduced Arabic as both a sacred and scholarly language. In the great centres of learning, such as Timbuktu, Djenne, and Gao, Arabic was used for theology, law, astronomy, and science. Yet, many local scholars adapted the Arabic script to write their own languages for clerical purposes, a tradition knows as Ajami. Through Ajami, languages such as Hausa, Fulfulde, Wolof, Songhay and Mandinka gained written forms centuries before European colonisation.

Ajami scripts were creative linguistic systems adapted to express African phonology and grammar. Special diacritics and new letter shapes were often added to represent sounds absent in Arabic. Ajami manuscripts include poetry, correspondence, historical chronicles, and religious commentaries. They reveal a thriving tradition of literacy that connected local communities with the broader Islamic world, while preserving their lingusitic and cultural uniqueness.

Before Ajami, several indigenous scripts emerged independently or semi-indepently. The Nsibidi symbols, used among secret socities in southeast Nigeria since 200 BC, predate colonisation, Islam, and even many modern alphabets. The Vai script was also developed in Liberia, a corner of West Africa that was unaffected by the conquest of Islam, creating one of the few truly indigenous syllabaries in Africa.

The late 19th and 20th centuries however brought European colonisation, which profoundly altered the linguistic landscape. Instead of languages like Songhai in Mali, Fulani in Guinea, and Hausa in Nigeria staying lingua francas, they were replaced by French, English and to a lesser extent Portuguese. These European languages became the administrative and educational languages for all of West Africa, and indigenous languages were often marginalised. European scripts, specifically the Latin alphabet, were adapted to African languages to ease administrative processes, often through missionary linguists who didn't want to use Islamic scripts.

After colonisation, it was decided to not only keep the colonial borders of Africa but to also standardise the orthographies used during colonial times, facilitating easy literacy and publishing. Latinisation, while a loss to the cultural landscape in Africa, enabled the production of newspapers, grammars, and educational materials using technologies imported from Europe, and became the national policies in most post-independence states.

However, many recognised the problems of Latin scripts and devised new totally unique scripts in the late 20th century and early 21st centuries. The Adlam script for example was invented in Guinea in the laet 1980s, and stands out as a success story for the Fulani language as it is now available in Unicode and digital fonts. Similar efforts surround Vai, N'Ko and Tifinaagh.