Kpelle font
The Kpelle script is a syllabary of the Kpelle , the language of the Kpelle people in West Africa .
The font was developed in the 1930s by Chief Gbili from Sanoyie in Liberia in order to be able to write the Kpelle language.
It consists of 88 graphemes and is written in horizontal lines from left to right. Many of the glyphs have more than one shape.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, the font gained a certain distribution among Kpelle speakers in Liberia and Guinea, but was unable to establish itself sustainably due to the poorly developed school system and the lack of political will.
In the meantime, the Latin alphabet has replaced the Kpelle script, and Kpelle is now written with an alphabet based on the Latin. However, as part of the University of California, Berkeley's Script Encoding Initiative , it was proposed to include the font in Unicode .
literature
- David Dalby: A survey of the indigenous scripts of Liberia and Sierra Leone: Vai, Kpelle, Kpelle and Bassa , in: African Language Studies 8, 1967, pp. 1-51.
- Ruth Stone: Ingenious invention: the indigenous Kpelle script , in: Liberian Studies Journal 15: 2, 1990, pp. 135-144.
Web links
- Preliminary proposal for encoding the Kpelle script in the SMP of the UCS , 2010 (PDF, with bibliography on the Kpelle script; 674 kB)