African Languages - LingoDigest

The Alphabet of a Revolution: How N’Ko Is Uniting West Africa’s Languages

6 min read

While many alphabets are ancient, the N’Ko script was born in 1949 from one man’s defiant response to colonial prejudice. Created by Solomana Kante, this ingenious alphabet is perfectly tailored to the tonal Manding languages of West Africa, using a clever system of diacritics to capture nuances that Latin and Arabic scripts miss. Today, N’Ko is thriving in the digital age, serving as a powerful tool for literacy, cultural pride, and cross-border unity for millions.

Evolutionary Linguistics African Languages History Geography

The Great Bantu Migration: How a Language Family Shaped Half a Continent

6 min read

Over several millennia, a wave of migration spread a single language family from West-Central Africa to cover nearly the entire southern half of the continent. This was the Bantu Expansion, a monumental human journey pieced together not from ruins, but from linguistic breadcrumbs. By comparing shared vocabulary for farming, cattle, and iron, linguists have mapped how the ancestors of Swahili and Zulu speakers reshaped a continent.