From IPA to wildcards: A critical look at some African Latin orthographies

The article presents and discusses a few African Latin orthographies. The scope of the work is set out in section 1, while section 2 discusses a few orthographies featuring IPA symbols and diacritics. They were often the work of linguists and missionaries and were conceived for mother-tongue alphabetization and in order to translate and publish religious literature. They are scarcely useful in everyday casual writing, and especially so on a keyboard (where only a restricted set of symbols is to all practical purposes available). They are contrasted in section 3 with the use of digraphs and, most of all, with “wildcards:” symbols of the Latin, basic (unmodified) alphabet that are taken to use, often in an idiosyncratic manner, in order to represent phonemes that do not have a direct, built-in representation. The discussion is wrapped up in section 4, where the limits on the use of wildcards are evidenced and the practical limitations of many African orthographies reiterated.