Indigenous scripts of African languages

bibliographic database
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Periodical article

Title:	Indigenous scripts of African languages
Authors:	Meshesha, Million Jawahar, C.V.
Year:	2007
Periodical:	Indilinga: African Journal of Indigenous Knowledge Systems
Volume:	6
Issue:	2
Pages:	132-142
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Ethiopia
Subjects:	Amharic language writing systems African languages
Abstract:	Some of the languages spoken in Africa have their own indigenous scripts that are used for writing. This paper first gives an overview of these languages and then presents an in-depth script analysis of the Amharic writing system, one of the well-known indigenous scripts of Africa. Amharic is the official and working language of Ethiopia and one of the few transnational African languages that function as lingua franca. The paper also highlights problems related to indigenous scripts that have bearing on the analysis and understanding of African language documents. The use of a large number of characters in writing and the existence of a large set of visually similar character pairs are some of the major problems that make research in the area of document analysis and understanding more challenging than that of Latin-based scripts. Bibliogr., sum. [Journal abstract, edited]