Which alphabet should the Somali language use?

  • The Cyrillic Alphabet

    Votes: 27 15.8%
  • The Latin Alphabet

    Votes: 77 45.0%
  • The Osmanya Alphabet

    Votes: 31 18.1%
  • The Kaddare Alphabet

    Votes: 20 11.7%
  • The Somalo-Arabic Alphabet

    Votes: 43 25.1%
  • Cyrillic/Latin/Kaddare Alphabets together

    Votes: 11 6.4%
  • Latin/Kaddare/Somalo-Arabic Alphabets together

    Votes: 8 4.7%
  • Cyrillic/Kaddare/Somalo-Arabic Alphabets together

    Votes: 7 4.1%
  • Latin/Cyrillic/Osmanya together

    Votes: 5 2.9%
  • Latin/Osmanya/Kaddare together

    Votes: 3 1.8%
  • Cyrillic/Osmanya/Kaddare together

    Votes: 5 2.9%
  • Cyrillic/Osmanya/Somalo-Arabic together

    Votes: 5 2.9%
  • Latin/Osmanya/Somalo-Arabic together

    Votes: 8 4.7%
  • Latin/Cyrillic/Osmanya/Somalo-Arabic/Kaddare together

    Votes: 17 9.9%

  • Total voters
    171
Speaking of music, I almost automstically have the song Africa by Toto stuck in my head when I visit this thread. I think I might have a problem :p

That's the other secret goal of this thread - to have a Somali band perform a cover of Africa by Toto while actually on Mt. Kilimanjaro above the Serengeti.
 
Alright, y'all - something interesting has come up that I think might warrant an update. My original intention was just to finish off the Red Nights in the Seastone City update BUT I just watched a Somali horror movie from the 60s that my 'rents dug up from storage and sent to me - it's...it's really something. Jinn, a knife murderer, and the colonial policemen who have to stop the magic-using killer.


I think I'm gonna delay the regular update in favor of a quick one on Colonial Somalia's horror films.
 
Honestly, I don't know why this was, only that it seemed to be true just from colonial censuses taken in Italian Somaliland and Italian Eritrea. Maybe @Neoteros can solve this one for us?

I don't know, either. But I think it might be because the average recruit could've been much more interested in sampling the local varieties of coffee than killing people - it's not like most of them were shipped to the Horn of Africa of their own free will, after all. It's for the same reason that the people back then went from supporting Mussolini to hanging him upside down from a gas station at the drop of a hat.
 
Just a question, was there ever a movement to change the script of Somali to Nastaleeq or a native one? Sorry if this sounds off topic just curious.
 
Supplemental Info Post 1 - Somali Alphabets
Don't apologize! It's an interesting topic and one I've been thinking about quite a bit, in fact. The common wisdom is that Somali didn't have an alphabet until the creation of the Latin orthography, but this is untrue. Somali didn't have a standard alphabet, which is a very different thing from not having an alphabet at all. Somali civilizations and scholars produced a number of writing systems over time:


1) The Lowland East Cushite Glyphs: Not an alphabet but a pictographic system, these glyphs are old - at least as old as New Kingdom Pharaonic Egypt.This is the cryptic writing adorning the cairns and steles that dot the northern Somali plains, but very little is known about it (or the people who made it for that matter; chances are good that the builders of the stone tombs are not the ancestors of the current Somalis - who modern researchers have begun to consider descendants of a migrating wave of pastoralists from NW Africa) and linguists are still working it out.

6534799821_56ef4d7f6f_z.jpg

A modern recreation of Lowland East Cushitic glyphs

2) Wadaad Writing: Wadaad writing is not so much a singular alphabet, but is instead a catch-all term for the various homecooked Arabic transliterative alphabets used to write Somali. Somali culture has been quite oral for most of its history, but Sufi scholars and legal petitions (pre-modern pastoral Somali society has often been called a kritarchy, rather accurately in my opinion, since the only authority a nomad family acknowledged was the Xeer customary law system) required a writing system, so Somali Arabic(s) were made that varied in particulars from location to location. The linguist Muuse Xaaji Ismaaciil Galaal codified it into one version in the 1950s - this is one of the four big competitors for the title of The Somali Alphabet when the Communists looked to standardize an alphabet.

somaliarabic.gif

Galaal's Somalo-Arabic Alphabet

3) Osmanya Alphabet - The Osmanya alphabet was created in 1922 by Cusmaan Yuusuf Keenadiid, a Sufi scholar, the brother of the Sultan of Obbia, and an amateur linguist. The first of the Native standardized alphabets for Somali, the Osmanya alphabet was the one initially pushed by the nationalists of the Somali Youth League. This is the second of the four heavyweight competitors for the role of official alphabet.

1a936d0208af8473c016d3fc25564d24.jpg

Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Osmanya script

4) The Kaddare Alphabet: My favorite Somali alphabet aesthetically speaking, Kaddare was made by Sheikh (not a literal sheikh like Sheikh Keenadiid, this is just his name) Kaddare in 1952. It only ever catches on amongst his clansfolk in the Hawiye (cue everybody looking through the tribes update to remember who the hell the Hawiye are :p) and is basically a non-starter compared to the other ones. Shame, cause it looks pretty cool.

kaddare.gif


5) The Latin Alphabet: Do I really have to explain this one? It's the Latin alphabet you all know and (presumably) love - adapted to the wonky vowels and glottal stops of Somali. The brains behind this one is linguistics professor and XHKS member Shire Jaamac Axmed and a small team of grad students at Somali National University - Mogadishu. It gets selected for practicality, as @ETA50M stated; the Somali government could buy tons of surplus office equipment, typewriters, and other supplies from the West and put it to good use if they shared an alphabet. It also facilitated the learning of other languages if students didn't have to relearn an alphabet from scratch. Pragmatic as ever, the Somali Communists announced that Shire Axmed's proposal was accepted and here we are today.

8606800c3761c1891e2a76c8903fffea.png

EDIT: Expect the horror film mini-update tomorrow - I know the last time I said that there would be a "short update" it turned into the behemoth post on Somali culture, but I promise that it'll actually be short this time!
 
Last edited:
Nothing South Arabian?

In classical trade cities on the Somali coast like Opone and Mosylon, there's evidence that Nabataean traders brought their alphabets with them, but good research into classical-era Somalia is rather sparse. In any case, it would have been a curiosity instead of a widely spread thing since the coastal trade cities of Somalia had fearsome naval capabilities but almost no power projection in the interior where most Somalis lived as nomads. They often had one or two extended families as client warriors, but as Opone learned the hard way, trying to exact obidence from the interior ended with the pastoralists banding together and burning your city to the ground.
 
Was Cyrillic ever considered? I know Somalia had close connections to the USSR, I wonder how well it conveys Somalian sounds.
 
Don't apologize! It's an interesting topic and one I've been thinking about quite a bit, in fact. The common wisdom is that Somali didn't have an alphabet until the creation of the Latin orthography, but this is untrue. Somali didn't have a standard alphabet, which is a very different thing from not having an alphabet at all. Somali civilizations and scholars produced a number of alphabets over time:


1) The Lowland East Cushite Alphabet: This alphabet is old - at least as old as New Kingdom Pharaonic Egypt.This is the cryptic writing adorning the cairns and steles that dot the northern Somali highlands but very little is known about it (or the people who made it for that matter; chances are good that the builders of the stone tombs are not the ancestors of the current Somalis - who modern researchers have begun to consider descendants of a migrating wave of pastoralists from NW Africa) and linguists are still working it out.

View attachment 388757
A modern recreation of Lowland East Cushitic glyphs

2) Wadaad Writing: Wadaad writing is not so much a singular alphabet, but is instead a catch-all term for the various homecooked Arabic transliterative alphabets used to write Somali. Somali culture has been quite oral for most of its history, but Sufi scholars and legal petitions (pre-modern pastoral Somali society has often been called a kritarchy, rather accurately in my opinion, since the only authority a nomad family acknowledged was the Xeer customary law system) required a writing system, so Somali Arabic(s) were made that varied in particulars from location to location. The linguist Muuse Xaaji Ismaaciil Galaal codified it into one version in the 1950s - this is one of the four big competitors for the title of The Somali Alphabet when the Communists looked to standardize an alphabet.

View attachment 388762
Galaal's Somalo-Arabic Alphabet

3) Osmanya Alphabet - The Osmanya alphabet was created in 1922 by Cusmaan Yuusuf Keenadiid, a Sufi scholar, the brother of the Sultan of Obbia, and an amateur linguist. The first of the Native standardized alphabets for Somali, the Osmanya alphabet was the one initially pushed by the nationalists of the Somali Youth League. This is the second of the four heavyweight competitors for the role of official alphabet.

View attachment 388758
Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Osmanya script

4) The Kaddare Alphabet: My favorite Somali alphabet aesthetically speaking, Kaddare was made was made by Sheikh (not a literal sheikh like Sheikh Keenadiid, this is just his name) Kaddare in 1952. It only ever catches on amongst his clansfolk in the Hawiye (cue everybody looking through the tribes update to remember who the hell the Hawiye are :p) and is basically a non-starter compared to the other ones. Shame, cause it looks pretty cool.

5) The Latin Alphabet: Do I really have to explain this one? It's the Latin alphabet you all know and (presumably) love - adapted to the wonky vowels and glottal stops of Somali. The brains behind this one is linguistics professor and XHKS member Shire Jaamac Axmed and a small team of grad students at Somali National University - Mogadishu. It gets selected for practicality, as @ETA50M stated; the Somali government could buy tons of surplus office equipment, typewriters, and other supplies from the West and put it to good use if they shared an alphabet. It also facilitated the learning of other languages if students didn't have to relearn an alphabet from scratch. Pragmatic as ever, the Somali Communists announced that Shire Axmed's proposal was accepted and here we are today.

EDIT: Expect the horror film mini-update tomorrow - I know the last time I said that there would be a "short update" it turned into the behemoth post on Somali culture, but I promise that it'll actually be short this time!

The Kaddare script vaguely looks like the Glagolitic one; it's a pity it didn't catch on, since I'm quite fond of the Cyrillic alphabet's predecessor. By the way, did Somali communist law include elements of Xeer in it, or did they try to stamp out every trace of nomadic/pastoralist custom?
 
Was Cyrillic ever considered? I know Somalia had close connections to the USSR, I wonder how well it conveys Somalian sounds.

A Cyrillic alphabet was considered as one of the 16 proposed alphabets, but apparantly it didn't catch on and wasn't much of a contender. Clearly some linguist was able to make it work - it also has the benefit of allowing for importation of Soviet tech which would prob be cheaper for the Somalis. Kediye was considerably more oriented towards the USSR than Barre, so he might very well throw his weight behind it. It would be pretty cool to have an African language using Cyrillic script, that's for sure.

The Kaddare script vaguely looks like the Glagolitic one; it's a pity it didn't catch on, since I'm quite fond of the Cyrillic alphabet's predecessor. By the way, did Somali communist law include elements of Xeer in it, or did they try to stamp out every trace of nomadic/pastoralist custom?

I agree that Glagolitic is a really pretty script - Old Church Slavonic is a cool language in and of itself, but the script has a very Old World feel that I like.

Tthe laws of the SDR at a local or municipal level should be understood as a continuation of xeer - much of the early law-making of the SDR was just the codifing, modernizing, and "communizing" of the body of Somali customary law.
 
Last edited:
Top