Piers Kelly writes:

In a small West African village, a man named Momolu Duwalu Bukele had a compelling dream. A stranger approached him with a sacred book and then taught him how to write by tracing a stick on the ground. “Look!” said the spectral visitor. “These signs stand for sounds and meanings in your language.”

Bukele, who had never learned to read or write, found that after waking he could no longer recall the precise signs the stranger revealed to him. Even so, he gathered the male members of his family together to reverse engineer the concept of writing. Working through the day and into the following night, the men devised a system of 200 symbols, each standing for a word or a syllable of their native Vai language. For millennia, varieties of the Vai language had been passed down from parents to children—but before this moment no speaker had ever recorded a single word in writing.

This took place in about 1833 in a region that would soon become the independent nation of Liberia. Vai, one of about 30 Indigenous languages of Liberia, has nearly 200,000 speakers today in the Cape Mount region that borders Sierra Leone.

Within just a few generations, Bukele’s invention was being used for penning letters, engraving jewelry, drafting carpentry plans, keeping personal diaries, and managing accounts. Vai people manufactured their own ink from crushed berries and even built schools for teaching the new system. The script was so successful that other Indigenous groups in the region were inspired to create their own; since the 1830s, at least 27 new scripts have been invented for West African languages.

Today the Vai writing system is taught at the University of Liberia and is even popular among students who are not themselves ethnically Vai. The Vai script has been included in the Unicode Standard, which means Vai speakers with smartphones can now exchange text messages in the script.

As a linguistic anthropologist, I am fascinated by the Vai discovery—and especially how the script has become critical for understanding the evolution of writing itself. [Continue reading…]