The N'ko script, and the movement that is spreading its use is an
interesting case of a grassroots movement in Africa that is also taking
advantage of ICT. A couple of things bring it back to my attention this
week, including Michael Everson's work helping the N'ko Unicode proposal,
the link for which (see below) I accessed through the Script Encoding
Initiative site at UC-Berkeley - http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~dwanders/

The Fakoli.net site (link below) has links to pages that show and explain
the alphabet, its origins, etc.

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net

----- Original Message -----
From: "Don Osborn" <dzo@...>
To: <AfricanLanguages@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2003 10:49 PM
Subject: [AfricanLanguages] N'ko


N'ko* is an alphabet designed originally for the Mande (or Manding)
languages of West Africa (Malinké, Mandingo, Bambara, Jula) by Souleyman
Kanté in the 1940s. It is also an active literacy and cultural movement.
Links for more information are at:
http://www.fakoli.net/NKo%20Ressources.htm

I bring this up now for two reasons. First I've been in touch recently with
someone regarding a project who, as it turns out, is also doing work on
web-based language instruction modules for N'ko.

The second reason is that I just heard more news of the progress of encoding
N'ko for Unicode/ISO-10646. The proposal shown at
http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/nko.pdf won't tell you much,
but the fact it's this far now towards inclusion in the Unicode standard is
worth noting.

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net

* N'ko literally means I say. Sometimes you will see the script name
written Nko.