Noto Sans Adlam Unjoined

Adlam is young for an alphabet. Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry were teenagers when they created it, around 1989, to write Fulani, also called Fula, a language of some 65 million speakers that in Guinea had made do with Latin or Arabic letters. Schools in Guinea, Nigeria, Liberia and elsewhere teach it now.

The script is written from right to left, it tells capitals from small letters, and every 1 of its 28 letters has 4 forms. In ordinary running text the letters link up, as Arabic and N’Ko letters do. This font keeps them apart.

That choice matters for 2 jobs in particular, headlines and teaching. A child learning the alphabet sees each letter whole, with no join hiding its shape, and a headline in separate letters reads clearly from across a room. For running text the joined, cursive variant of Adlam is the better pick.

Mark Jamra and Neil Patel drew the family for Google’s Noto collection in Regular, Medium, Semi Bold and Bold, which is a good range for a school book where headings and exercises want weights of their own. It covers 149 characters across the Adlam, Basic Latin and General Punctuation blocks, and like any Adlam font it relies on software that handles complex text shaping.