Mandombe

The word 'Mandombe' in the Mandombe script.

Mandombe or Mandombé, is a native African alphasyllabary invented in 1978 by Wabeladio Payi in Mbanza Ngungu in the Bas-Congo province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This script is taught in primary, secondary and post-secondary schools run by the Kimbanguist Church in Angola, the Republic of the Congo, DR Congo, and by more than 500 professors at the Centre for the Negro-African Script in DR CongoFact|date=June 2007.

It can be used to transcribe Kikongo, Lingala, Tshiluba and Swahili, four national languages of DR Congo, as well as many other languages of central and southern Africa. The Mandombe Academy at CENA is currently working on transcribing other African languages in the script.

No proposal has been made as yet to encode the script in Unicode.

Vowels

A vowel can be written individually and form a syllable on its own. If it forms part of a diphthong, a diacritic is used.

Digits

See also

* Syllabary
* Alphasyllabary
* Alphabet
* Africa Alphabet, African Reference Alphabet
* N'Ko alphabet
* Kimbanguism

External links

* [http://www.mandombe.info CENA] (in French)
* [http://www.bisharat.net/wikidoc/pmwiki.php/PanAfrLoc/Mandombe Mandombe script]

References

Largely translated from , version as of 25 April 2006