This entry is an example of how Microsoft’s mission “to empower all people” was applied to a completely new and different strategy for the brand, and in clear service of market needs: helping the nomadic Fulani people of West Africa preserve their culture and giving them access to their alphabet – digitally.

The momentum and impact in just two years has been transformative for the 60 million Fulani people living across West Africa. It has made a seemingly lofty imperative – preserving a culture – attainable and created a blueprint for future language preservation programs at Microsoft.

Imagine you couldn't write this entry. Or even write anything at all.

That was the reality for 60 million Fulani people spread across West Africa – not because they didn't have a language – but because they didn't have an alphabet or writing system.

The importance of ADLaM to this community was to preserve their own history, culture and language in their native tongue. Microsoft’s mission was to enable that preservation and ensure they could thrive in a modern and digital world.

There is no business benchmark to preserving a culture and language. We only know that when economies thrive, Microsoft benefits indirectly from the outsize benefits realized by the communities themselves. That is a long process we are committed to.

We had one objective: Access.

To expand digital access to the alphabet itself and to expand access to literacy and the impact on students learning the language.

The U.N. predicts that 90% of the world’s languages could be extinct within the century.

The Fulani people of West Africa are the world’s largest nomadic group. Pulaar, their native tongue, existed without an alphabet for generations. They relied on the spoken word to pass down traditions, codify their history and conduct business.

Without an alphabet, illiteracy thrived. Written records, poems and stories were either cobbled together using foreign alphabets of their former colonizers or disappeared over time. As access to digital technology grew, adoption of foreign alphabets became inevitable.

The risk was that their culture would be swallowed by one that could operate in a digital world.

Two brothers, Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry, wanting to change that, began working on a handwritten alphabet for Pulaar. They called it ADLaM. ADLaM is an acronym translating to: “the alphabet that will prevent a people from disappearing.”

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization around the world to achieve more. For Microsoft, inclusion is a business imperative.

In the case of ADLaM, empowerment starts with access. Access to language and literacy would not only help preserve Fulani culture, but empower people and drive economies. Because when literacy grows, economies grow and when businesses thrive, so does Microsoft. This was especially important in Africa, a rapidly growing region in the digital economy - projected to add 796 million to its workforce by 2050 and see 500 million migrate to cities, powering service economies.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization around the world to achieve more.

In this case, Microsoft’s mission was to ensure the Fulani people had access to digital ecosystems – to preserve their language and culture – but also to have a future in a digital economy for generations to come.

For Microsoft, Inclusion is truly a business imperative.

Globally, Microsoft provides a foundation for people and businesses to communicate. Improving literacy preserves culture and empowers people but it also drives economies. And when economies grow and thrive, so does Microsoft.

There is no benchmark for preservation of a language.

We set out to improve access to the alphabet and expand literacy in one of the fastest-growing regions of the world that will add 796 million people to its workforce by 2050 and see 500 million people migrate from rural areas to cities to power service economies.

You need to work with communities when designing for communities.

Cultural missteps happen when you do things for a community without the community. So we partnered closely with Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry and members of their teaching community to first understand why they had adoption issues with a previous digital alphabet. We uncovered that the letterforms had changed in the hands of the Fulani people. We uncovered a lack of standardized teaching materials. And we uncovered a keen urgency to make permanent almost 3 decades of work on ADLaM.

Our breakthrough was understanding that for the Fulani, an alphabet wasn't just a tool for expression, but an operating system for survival.

Alphabets typically take hundreds of years to evolve into their final form. They needed to act with urgency to avoid being consumed by the more expansively used colonial languages of West Africa - namely French and Arabic.

An alphabet that fully reflects Fulani culture.

With the help of the Barry brothers, typeface experts and Fulani graphic culture specialists, we used real-time community feedback to rapidly revise outdated letterforms to create a new and optimized version.

Once letterforms took shape, we looked to take inspiration from rich Fulani visual culture. We researched hundreds of traditional khasas (blankets), arkillas (bed-screens), facial tattoos and decorative objects with unique patterned designs with historical and cultural significance. With guidance from the community, we ultimately incorporated the design “Kore Totte” (inverted calabashes) as a motif that resonated the most with the Fulani community.

We thus brought the community into the creative development ensuring the design itself represented not only how the alphabet evolved, but also to make the typeface a cultural artifact in its own right.

Expanding literacy for the Fulani people was ROI enough. Results have been astounding considering the time frame.

ADLaM Display is on over 1 billion devices around the world that run Microsoft 365.

Our open source alphabet is now on Google Fonts and was used over 2.18 million times (April 14, 2023).

New Schools Opened in 5 Countries in 2023-2024 (Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire and The Gambia).

ADLaM will be taught to 2 million students in Guinea in the next 5 years as part of the government’s Sustainable Development Strategy

Mali is adding ADLaM as an official alphabet in their Constitution which will expand access to teaching it in public schools.

The community embraced the alphabet with an online dictionary with #ADLaMRe and used the alphabet in local businesses.

ADLaM Display will impact other languages - the Bambara, Bozo and Dogon languages share phonology and syntax with Pulaar.