It's a bit confusing because the word ʿajamī simply means anything written
in a non-Arabic language with Arabic script. Africa is certainly not the
only place where that term has been used. It is also the case that Arabic
script has been used to write West African languages for very many
centuries. There is no way that guy can have grown up there and not know
that so I don't understand what this article is up to. Possibly this is a
separate adaptation using its own conventions for writing the local
language. Probably just pop-sci sensationalism coupled with some rather
severe mis-/non-understanding on the part of the article author.

Den sön 1 jan. 2023 14:30Alain Delmotte via ntg-context <ntg-context@ntg.nl>
skrev:

> Le 1/01/2023 à 11:03, Henning Hraban Ramm via ntg-context a
> écrit :
> > Am 01.01.23 um 10:21 schrieb Hans Hagen via ntg-context:
> >> On 12/31/2022 3:06 PM, Henning Hraban Ramm via
> >> ntg-context wrote:
> >>> I just read this:
> >>>
> https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/fallou-ngom-discovers-ajami-african-writing-system/
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> And now I’d like to know if ConTeXt is capable of
> >>> typesetting this variant of Arabic. (Just out of
> >>> curiosity, I can’t read any Arabic and don’t know any
> >>> African language.)
> >> Afaiks that script has been known fro a while:
> >
> > I also thought I heard about it several years ago. The
> > article makes it sound like news, that might be the
> > perspective of the US scholars or a necessary means to get
> > funded. But the oldest sources quoted in Wikipedia are
> > from 1971 and 1982.
>
> The arabic alphabet was also used from the XIth century to
> write swahili and some bantu languages around Tanzania and
> Kenya (Mozambic, Malawi, Uganda, east of Kongo, Sudan).
>
> There are articles in Wikipedia.
>
> https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_arabe_swahili
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language#Orthography
>
> also: https://www.mustgo.com/worldlanguages/swahili/  see
> "writing"
> https://omniglot.com/writing/swahili.htm
>
> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajami_script
> >> so when there are proper fonts, as:
> >> https://software.sil.org/scheherazade/
> >> https://software.sil.org/harmattan/
> >
> > I don’t dare to ask about the Husayni fonts... ;)
> >
> >> it should be doable. The script is supported by unicode.
> >> I get the impression that the arabic scipt is mostly used
> >> getting the way the languages sounds on paper so vowels
> >> matter. There is mentioning of transliteration and so
> >> that might need some specific support. Nothing tex
> >> (context) can't do but only users and usage can prove that.
> >
> > Thank you for your insights!
> > Of course it’s a matter of use(r)s.
> >
> > All the best for a happy new year!
> > Hraban
> >
> >
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