Editing African Reference Alphabet (section)

{{Short description|Defunct orthographic guideline for Africa}}
{{distinguish|Africa Alphabet}}

The '''African Reference Alphabet''' is a largely defunct continent-wide guideline for the creation of [[Latin alphabets]] for African languages. Two variants of the initial proposal (one in English and a second in French) were made at a 1978 [[UNESCO]]-organized conference held in [[Niamey]], Niger. They were based on the results of several earlier conferences on the harmonization of established Latin alphabets of individual languages. The 1978 conference recommended the use of single letters for speech sounds rather than of [[Digraph (orthography)|letter sequences]] or of letters with [[diacritic]]s. A substantial overhaul was proposed in 1982 but was rejected in a follow-up conference held in Niamey in 1984. Since then, continent-wide harmonization has been largely abandoned, because regional needs, practices and thus preferences differ greatly across Africa.<ref>Karan & Roberts (2020: 925) Orthography standardization. In Dimmendaal & Vossen (eds.) ''The Oxford Handbook of African Languages''.</ref>

Through the individual languages that were its basis, the African Reference Alphabet inherits from the [[Africa Alphabet]], and like the latter uses a number of [[International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA]] letters. The Niamey conference built on the work of a previous UNESCO-organized meeting, on harmonizing the transcriptions of African languages, that was held in [[Bamako]], Mali, in 1966.