Boston.com has a good article up on Ajami at the moment. I’m not sure we have touched on it before here, bur Ajami is, like xiaoerjin, an adaptation of the Arabic script to write non-Semitic languages, in this case a number of otherwise unwritten African languages. While slightly outside my normal scope, I’ve been interested in Ajami since I heard about it about a year back and am interested to see where scholarship on the subject goes in the coming years.

Here’s a bit from the article:

“Ajami script had been widely used across Africa for day-to-day writing in a dozen languages, and Ngom knew those writings had been largely overlooked in the official story of the continent – in part because so few historians could read them”

Hat tip to Syz who reminded me to stop neglecting my blog reading duties and for sending me the Jabal al-Lughat post on the same article. It’s one of those must-read blogs that I don’t follow as closely as I should due to the Blogspot ban.