A few orthographies for writing Senegambian Languages have been developed over the last few centuries[1], including divergent Ajami abugida, Ajami-like alphabets developed by APESS in Burkina Faso [2], Latin-based orthographies influenced by French, Portuguese or English, and indigenous alphabets Fula Dita (c. 1960)[3], Fula Ba (Mali, 1963)[4], Wolof Garay (1961) [5], and ADLaM (1987)[6].

Like many native speakers of Senegambian Languages, I applaud the modern inventors for dedicating their time and energy to the revival of our culture. Unfortunately, a closer look at the different scripts shows that even the most original of scripts confer no additional functionality over Latin or Ajami; in fact, some proposed orthographies are less practical than either the Latin- or Arabic-based scripts in terms of space that each letter occupies and the time it takes to write them. In essence, the value-add of adopting any of the new scripts is not obvious.

Mutually Intelligible is a compilation of what I think addresses the barriers to speaking and writing Senegambian Languages, which include ubiquitous consonant mutations, a glut of mutant noun classes, and inefficient orthographies. To address these issues, I have built from the ground-up an intuitive writing system based on only four fundamental “mutable” characters that can be modified in a predictable manner -- based on the rules of consonant mutation -- to model the entire inventory of Senegambian phonemes. This novel script may be construed as reinventing the wheel had the alphabets being a collection of random characters -- as some previous inventors have done, but Mutually Intelligible features a reimagined wheel that is adaptable to different terrain driven by different users.

The work herein is motivated entirely by my upbringing. I am a PhD candidate in the life sciences, an avid reader of Senegambian linguistics papers, and a 27-year old native speaker of Fuuta-Jalon Pular. I have lived most of my life in urban areas along the West African coast and in New York State surrounded by very few native Haali-Pular. And it is from the perspective of these diverse next-door neighbors and roommates that I fashion this paper. I make the basic assumptions that my audience is an adult who may not speak any Fula dialect but understands the basics of English language grammar. I reason that if this hypothetical individual can understand the complex syntaxes explained herein then native speakers of grade-school age will have no problem following along, given that they have had a head-start to intuit Senegambian grammar.

When I began writing Mutually Intelligible I was primarily interested in providing a mechanism for increasing intelligibility among native speakers of various Fula dialects. But along the way I learned that Fula is linguistically related and typologically similar to other Senegambian Languages[7]. This finding led me to stress-test my initial Fula-centric alphabets and make appropriate changes so as to typographically model consonant mutations among the greater Senegambian Languages. Still, a lack of familiarity with other Senegambian Languages means I will focus my attention on Fula in this paper, but will draw attention to typological similarities within the group.