Vai

Vai (Vai: ꕙꔤ) is a Western Mande (Niger-Congo) language spoken by roughly 104,000–120,000 people in Liberia and Sierra Leone. It is written with the Vai syllabary, one of the earliest and most successful of the some two dozen indigenous West African scripts created in the 19th and 20th centuries (alongside Bamum, Nʼko, Mende Kikakui and Bassa Vah); older African scripts such as Geʽez and Tifinagh predate it and remain in use. The syllabary was devised around 1832–33 by Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ — reportedly after a dream — with associates, amid heavy Atlantic trade contact but outside European colonial rule (Liberia being a settlement of freed African Americans, independent from 1847). Many scholars attribute it to stimulus diffusion — the idea of writing prompted by exposure to Latin, Arabic and perhaps Cherokee — though its signs are largely original. The Vai sit at the Mande–Atlantic contact zone; the script was encoded in Unicode 5.1 (2008, U+A500–A63F).

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