Ibhaliwe = script tailored for the Xhosa language; Mono Sans = its first typeface.
January 2020
Project leader, Researcher, Designer, Web designer Siranush.
Tools used for Font Making: Adobe Illustrator, Font Forge, Python programming language.
Image: Xhosa fabrics and designs by one of the most accomplished modern South African designers, Laduma Ngxokolo.
Drafts of letters for Ibhaliwe.
One of the official languages of South Africa, Xhosa (a click language that has closely interacted with Khoisian, the protolanguage, as researchers suggest) is the most widely distributed language in South Africa. As many other indigenous languages in South Africa, it has a complex history (its education was restricted by the segregative Bantu Education Act, 1953). Most recently, it has inspired hundreds of millions via its usage in naming one of the leading operating systems, Ubuntu (”community”), its usage in Marvel movies/other entertainment, South Africa's hymn and its popularization through widely known Xhosa-natives (anti-apartheid revolutionary leaders Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, Miss Universe 2019 Zozibini Tunzi and many others).
The Xhosa language possesses unique phonetics, capitalisation incentives, morphology, differentiating characteristics informing orthography/punctuation, as well as an autonomous calendar, color and number systems. The Xhosa language is designed to align with philosophies of the Xhosa people as well as their milieu of extensive oral traditions, playing a paramount role in generation and preservation of the Xhosa creative practices.
“I am afraid that after my generation nobody will know Xhosa.”
— Afika Nyati, MIT’18
Xhosa Ibhaliwe Mono Sans. From top to bottom: transcribed from latin A to Z in capitals, lower-case letters and numbers.
Given present-day’s technological revolution, rapid growth of available media and acceleration of information transfer, oral languages like Xhosa are in danger much more than when they were competing with those that had handwritten scripts in the past. Currently available Latin script for Xhosa does not respond to the specifics of the language and the underlying creative practices and relations to the Xhosa culture’s different aspects. Need to spark a discussion and motivate creative design in this direction has led to Imbhaliwe (written) project to make a script.
Even though this is the first (to my knowledge) widely available iteration of a Xhosa script, I kindly invite Xhosa enthusiasts to help make suggestions on this website to improve and develop these linguistic tools further.
Here you can also find a disclaimer regarding my (not a Xhosa) participation in this project.
Making a written language involves responding to the needs to transcribe oral language into a different (visual, 2D) dimension. Design decisions both for Ibhaliwe and Mono Sans were both made out of finding a balance between pragmatism optimizing for maximal usage/accelerating learning Xhosa and connections with creative cultural practices, environment and beliefs uniquely defining Xhosas within the global community and history.
Who? When? How? should design a script and typefaces for Xhosa?
Under supervision of Prof Edoh from MIT Anthropology and Global Studies I conducted studies with first and second speakers of Xhosa language and immersed myself in Xhosa community and culture in South Africa. Currently I am crowdsourcing information from other Xhosa speakers on the first iteration of the design presented here.
“Gain new strength to build a brighter world untrammell’d by the wiles of endless strife created by the ravenous kings of gold.” — AC Jordan
Dream it.
Amongst the 1st Xhosa literature writers was Archibald Campbell (A.C.) Jordan (1906-1968) who was responsible for the formal development of the written Xhosa language and its further teaching. Since then, the Xhosa language in South Africa, has developed to be the most evolved and researched indigenous spoken language, with lots of written literature. This development of the language is ongoing, and many are today writing Masters and PhD theses on the Xhosa language. Its teaching is also gaining greater prominence, especially in Eastern and Western Cape schools in South Africa, two provinces where the Xhosa people are the majority. In order to fuel the contribution of Xhosa literature to the global (as well as the Xhosa literacy) through digitization of Xhosa-tailored writing system (Ibhaliwe), Mono Sans Regular font was decided to be created.
An example of alphabetic + abugida system.
Build it.
Research on cultural practices, environment, phonetics and mechanics of the language yielded: geometry: alphabetic and abugida type; round, sans serif, colorful, can be changing boldness; orthography: abrade or no separation of morphemes, space between “phrases”, left to right or boustrophedon; number glyphs with additive geometry from 0 to 9; no capitalization; “?” and “!” (variable strength) before the word, “didot” and “tridot”; forms of nature: elephant-silhouettes, star-like and floral clustering of glyphs, satellite vowels, glyph modification based on phonetic anatomy. I have been taking inspiration from written script creation logic used in many cultures, such as Sesotho’s Pan-South African Ditema Tsa Dinoko, Korean Hangul, as well as in those languages that I knew/was more acquainted with (Armenian, Georgian, Russian, German, French, English, Latin). I also computationally analyzed sample texts in Xhosa to calculate occurrences of certain phonemes and diphthongs to inform my design.
Making of Mono Sans.
Spread it.
Once the glyphs are finalized, designing the first typeface and its first font is a matter of using Adobe Illustrator. I created each glyph individually, drawing them on the screen using bezier curves. Then I used FontForge open source software to import each glyph (even space) to an appropriate mapping on the keyboard (for example, Shift+ denotes that either nothing changes since there are no capital letters or an ‘h’-ificated glyph is outputted; characters like @,#,$ etc. encode clicks; simple dot is encoded as three dots with holes). Then spatial boundaries around glyphs are placed individually and pairwise kerning between 66 letters (which is 66^2 = 4.5 thousand pairs) is placed (I did this part automatically). Kerning ensures that letters whose forms are like key and lock are not matched near each other, but rather within each other.
Contributors
Design by Siranush Babakhanova
Xhosa experts Fundile and Afika Nyati
Supervision by Prof Amah Edoh