The Vai Script: A Writing System Made in Liberia

In the 1830s, in what is now western Liberia, a group of Vai men led by Momolu Duwalu Bukele created a script for their own language. It was not an adaptation of the Latin alphabet. It was a syllabary: each character stands for a syllable rather than a single sound.

Accounts within the community describe the script as coming to Bukele in a dream, and its development as the work of several men together.

Writing without school

What makes the Vai script unusual is how it spread. It was not taught in schools or promoted by a government. People learned it from relatives and neighbours, and used it for letters, records, trade accounts and personal notebooks.

That informal transmission attracted researchers: studies of Vai literacy in the twentieth century examined what happens to reading and reasoning when writing is learned outside formal education.

Still in use

The script is still written by hand in Vai towns, and has been added to Unicode, which means it can be typed and displayed on phones and computers. Its characters have shifted over time as writers standardised and simplified them.

What we are recording next

Our Liberia collection begins with Vai writers: what people write in the script today, how it is taught at home, and which letters and notebooks families have kept.