While not one of my core concerns, typography has long been an interest of mine (LH: 2003, 2010, 2017), and I couldn’t resist Ugonna-Ora Owoh’s Meet the Nigerian graphic designers bringing African expression to typography:
Contrary to what might be known, type design has always had a quiet but steady presence in Nigeria’s visual culture. Long before digital fonts and design software, lettering thrived on the country’s streets: hand-painted shop signs, market boards, danfo buses, and film posters all carried unique typographic expressions that reflected regional dialects and everyday aesthetics. These vernacular letterforms, often created by self-taught sign painters, formed the foundation of a distinctly Nigerian typographic identity, one rooted in improvisation, and storytelling. But they weren’t widely appreciated or respected, so gradually, these vernacular letterforms began to find themselves amidst imported Western forms which slowly blurred their identity.
However, the good news is a growing number of Nigerian designers are returning to the craft, building on both digital innovation and traditional sensibilities. These type designers are experimenting with indigenous scripts to craft fonts inspired by street typography, and they are even redefining what Nigerian type can look like. And the beautiful thing is, this is finding its way into global design conversations.
I really like the examples and I hope the designers continue their work and thrive. (Via MeFi.)
It’s not just the typography. Nigerian sign and banner painters have a distinguished history and interesting cultural role, involving both text and images.
Yes indeed.
I don’t understand the actual causal connection between the various interesting-looking fonts shown and either “regional dialects” or “indigenous scripts.” This may well be because the writer is just throwing exoticizing-bullshit cliches around without actually meaning anything by them, but if there were actually some there there it would be interesting to have it better described.
The illustration of one particular font being used for various diacritical-heavy Central-European words like Überlaufen is a good demonstration of how these fonts need not actually be confined to some exoticizing role but are susceptible of wide use.
The illustration of one particular font being used for various diacritical-heavy Central-European words like Überlaufen is a good demonstration of how these fonts need not actually be confined to some exoticizing role but are susceptible of wide use.
Yes, I liked that too.
“regional dialects”
This is, of course, journo-speak for “local languages.” (Not just journos, to be fair: this legacy of colonial disdain for African languages unfortunately lives on in everyday Anglophone African usage too.)
It might be a reference to the use of underdots in traditional Yoruba orthography (Hausa, too, though for a quite different reason.) Yoruba people are also keen on writing tone marks these days, too (and good luck to them.)
Not sure about Nigeria, but in Ghana, the letters ɛ and ɔ are very familiar to people, and turn up often in informal signage and the like.
(So much so, that they got introduced into the latest iteration of standard Kusaal orthography, in which they’re actually pretty much redundant. People were just used to seeing them used for [ɛ ɔ] in Twi, I reckon.)
Not that this ought to be a constraint on design, but are these contexts where both Ṻ and Ǖ are needed? Does ꟽ have modern uses?
In a better world, the Kusaal name of the perhaps-historical “Red Hunter”, whose descendants founded the Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms, would be written Tɔ̰̃̀:s-Zḭ̃́ã̰. OK, maybe not a better world …
Not many West African languages actually have rounded front vowels at all, at least as phonemes (e.g. Kusaal has an [y], but only as an allophone of /u/.) In fact, I can’t think of any that do, but I’ve no doubt there must be some among all the hundreds of languages there.
WALS has a pretty map, natch:
https://wals.info/feature/11A#2/87.4/67.9
Efik!
No, Ejagham. Efik is the white dot to its south.
The WALS map shows Ejagham, based on Watters’ dissertation, which has phonemic /ʉ/. PHOIBLE shows Siamou with phonemic /y/, based on an unpublished work by Lillian Haas. However, the phoneme inventory in Toews’ dissertation on Siamou TAM mentions no such vowel, quoting a later work by Haas, now Nicolson.
There are a number of Grassfields languages with /y/, like Ngwe, but perhaps that’s not what you think of as West African.
Yeah, I thought I didn’t remember that for Efik. (It’s such an unusual feature for West Africa that it probably would have registered.)
Siamou looks quite interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siamou_language
It’s plainly not an isolate, though, nor can it be basically Mande with a lot of loanwords, as a paper linked from the WP page makes out:
https://hal.science/hal-01182225v2
Definitely Volta-Congo, unless one can convince oneself that it’s borrowed e.g. tí “tree”, dì “eat”, táaŋ “bow”, kúun “die”, bwôn “dog” … I mean, come on …
Proto-Oti-Volta *tɪ̀-bʊ “tree”, proto-Bantu *-tɪ́ “tree”
Proto-Oti-Volta *dɪ́- “eat”, proto-Bantu *dɪ́- “eat”
Proto-Oti-Volta *tãw-bʊ́ “bow”, proto-Bantu *-tá “bow.”
Proto-Oti-Volta *kpí- “die” (*kúm-mʊ “death”), proto-Bantu *kú- “die”
Proto-Oti-Volta *bǒ-ká “dog”, proto-Bantu *-bʊ́à “dog”
(There are further likely ones from basic vocabulary, but the language is evidently one of those that has disobligingly scrunched up its words and blatted its non-initial consonants, so finding tempting lookalikes is all too easy. Quite possibly bɔ̄ “arm” really is related to proto-Oti-Volta *bǎk- “arm” and proto-Bantu *-bókò “arm”, for example, but who can say? What am I, Joseph Greenberg?)
Nothing to suggest a particular association with “Gur.” I don’t known enough about Kru to be able to have a meaningful opinion as to whether the traditional assignment to Kru is reasonable.