Osmanya (Far Soomaali): the Somali alphabet of Cusmaan Yuusuf Keenadiid

Who made it and when

Osmanya was invented by one man, Cusmaan Yuusuf Keenadiid, in the years 1920 to 1922 (Tosco 2010, Somali writings). Tosco, following the Italian writer Maino, places his birth in Hobyo around the turn of the 20th century; the Calankii page on Osman Yusuf Kenadid gives 1889 from other sources. He was a younger brother of Suldaan Cali Yuusuf of Hobyo, learned Arabic in Hobyo and Mogadishu, wrote his family's letters in Arabic and knew some Italian. Tosco stresses that he did not know the Ethiopic script and that it played no part in the alphabet.

The Italian official Marcello Orano, posted to Hobyo, took him as his Somali teacher, and Enrico Cerulli published a first note on the script in 1932 from material given by Yaasiin, whom Tosco calls Cusmaan's nephew in one passage and his son in another (Tosco 2010). Calankii has a page on Yasin Osman Kenadid.

How it works

Osmanya is written from left to right. In its developed form it has 22 consonant signs and 8 vowel signs, and every consonant of Northern Somali has a sign (Tosco 2010). Tone is not written, as in today's Latin spelling. The order of letters follows the Arabic alphabet as closely as possible.

Early Osmanya wrote long vowels with two signs, in the Arabic way: aa as a plus glottal stop, ii and uu with y and w. Later, three new signs were made for aa, ee and oo, the glottal-stop sign fell out of use, and writers began to use taller letters as capitals, Western punctuation and some joined letters (Tosco 2010).

Osmanya keeps the parts of a word apart. The article is written separately from the noun: hooyada ("the mother") is written as hooyo da, and hasha ("the she-camel") as hal sha (Tosco 2010, citing Moreno 1955). It has its own digits for 0 to 9; the signs for 7 and 8 mirror each other, as in Arabic numerals.

The Youth League years

The Somali Youth Club, founded in Mogadishu on 15 May 1943, became the Somali Youth League in 1945. Article 5(d) of its statute backed Somali as the future national language and Osmanya as its script. The League invited Yaasiin to teach in Mogadishu in 1945 and opened schools in other towns and abroad, in Addis Ababa, Kenya, Zanzibar and Yemen (Tosco 2010, citing Maino 1951 and Ricci 1959). Many learners were young people, often women. In this period the script came to be called far Soomaali, "Somali writing".

About ten years later the League removed Osmanya from its statute. The Somali Language and Literature Society, founded by Yaasiin and others on 5 October 1949, carried on the work and from 1957 published Sahan, a three-page journal in Osmanya edited by Xirsi Magan (Tosco 2010). As late as 1971 the Society published a 72-page primer in Osmanya, Afkeenna iyo fartiisa ("Our language and its script") (Afkeenna iyo fartiisa, 1971, PDF).

Why it was not chosen

The Latin alphabet was made official in October 1972. Tosco names the cost of new type as the first reason Osmanya lost, and adds that many people saw it as tied to one clan (Tosco 2010). Cerulli had called it a Majeerteen attempt at an alphabet in 1932. Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi also lists opposition to Somali replacing Arabic, and to any home-made script (Culture and Customs of Somalia, 2001, p. 73).

Osmanya today

The typesetter Michael Everson used the 1971 primer to propose Osmanya for international encoding. It was added to Unicode 4.0 in April 2003, in the block U+10480 to U+104AF (Unicode chart, Osmanya; Tosco 2010). Tosco wrote in 2010 that interest in Osmanya continues, especially among young Somalis in the diaspora.

Read more

• Somali writing systems
• Osman Yusuf Kenadid
• How Somali came to be written