₦airaland Forum

Greetings, Nairalanders,

We want to share something we have been working on — a small set of open-source tools for the Hausa Ajami script. Nothing fancy, just a starting point we hope the community can build on.

What is Ajami?

Before the Latin script became standard, Hausa was written using an Arabic-derived script called Ajami. Scholars used it for Quranic commentary. Merchants used it for correspondence. Poets wrote in it. It has been in use since at least the 17th century in northern Nigeria and across the Sahel.

Most Hausa speakers today cannot read it because schools stopped teaching it during the colonial period. And until now there was no keyboard to type it, no app to learn it, and no simple translator.

What we built so far:

1. Ajami Keyboard (Android APK)
Type Hausa Ajami in any app on your phone — WhatsApp, SMS, notes, anywhere. Covers the full character set including the Hausa-specific letters like ٻ (ɓ), ڟ (ɗ), and the West African forms of Fa and Qaf. Works offline. Free.

2. Ajami Learn (Android APK)

Learn the 32 Hausa Ajami characters and common words through flashcards, quizzes, and finger-tracing. Each character card shows the phoneme, an example word in Ajami, the Latin pronunciation, and the English meaning. Offline, no account needed.

3. Ajami Translator (Web)
Type English, get the Hausa equivalent and its Ajami rendering. Also works in reverse — paste Ajami script, get Hausa Latin and English back. Built on a dictionary of 417 verified Hausa words. There is also a page where you can record pronunciation audio directly in your browser and contribute it to the project.

Links:


Keyboard: github.com/amshoo/ajami-keyboard
Learn: github.com/amshoo/ajami-learn
Translator: amshoo.github.io/ajami-translator
Contribute audio: amshoo.github.io/ajami-translator/contribute.html


What we need from this community:

This is where Nairaland can genuinely help more than anywhere else.

If you are a native Hausa speaker, please try the keyboard and tell us if any character is missing or mapped wrongly. Try the translator and tell us if any word translation is wrong. Open an issue on GitHub or just reply to this thread.

If you know Hausa Ajami and can spot orthography errors, we especially need you. The character-to-phoneme mappings are based on the West African Warsh/Kano tradition and are documented in the GitHub repos. Corrections are welcome.

If you can record clear Hausa pronunciation, the audio contribution page at the link above lets you record directly in your browser. The file downloads with the correct name. You just upload it to GitHub. The dictionary has 417 words and currently zero community recordings. Any contribution helps.

If you are a developer and want to add features, fix bugs, or help port this to another Ajami language like Fulfulde or Kanuri, the code is open source.

One more thing:

There are over 10 million primary-school-age children out of school in northern Nigeria. One thing that does not get discussed enough is that many of them have a Quranic school background and already know Arabic script. Hausa Ajami uses that same script. We think there is potential here for Ajami-based early literacy materials that would be more accessible to those children than English instruction in a foreign alphabet. These tools are a small piece of that infrastructure. If any educators or NGOs in this space want to explore this, we are open to conversation.

We know this is a work in progress. The dictionary needs to grow. The audio needs to be recorded. More languages need to be added. We are not claiming to have solved anything. We just wanted to make a start and put it in front of people who might care.

Thank you for reading. Replies, corrections, and criticism are all welcome.

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