African Alphabets of the Bayreuth Cluster (AABC) provides mobiles and desktop PCs (Windows and iOS) with keyboards for all common African languages and scripts. More information and the download link for the Mac/Windows program can be found at the bottom of this page. The keyboard layouts take account of the particular phonetic character variants and the respective Latin QWERTY-, QWERTZ-, or AZERTY-order. All characters are subject to their respective definition by Unicode and their adequate adoption by the system. Each keyboard consists of four pages that can be reproduced by a keyboard view on the screen. All keyboards can be used systemwide as well as offline, too. It is indicated if individual fonts or characters may be supported differently (or not yet at all) by the operating system in use and therefore cannot (yet) be displayed by the app. For the necessary further development of the app the user is invited to communicate his comments to Prof. Ulrich Rebstock ([email protected]). This interactive set-up is intended to harmonize cultural authenticity with scientific control of implementation and adjustment of the keyboard layouts. This also includes the selection and integration of language transcriptions and scripts for which hitherto already existing, or newly generated keyboard layouts are to be adopted. This article/book/volume/special issue is the outcome of research conducted within the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany ́s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2052/1 – 390713894.

The African Keyboard app is an Android keyboard implementing special characters of African languages that use Latin-based alphabets. Its goal is to give users means of writing their native languages and as such to promote the preservation and growth of those languages and their cultures.

The keyboard offers familiar QWERTY and AZERTY layouts and thus is usable for casual writing of English, French and so on. On top of this it offers sets of special characters used in various African languages. Those characters are grouped under keys according to graphical or phonetic resemblance and are accessible after long press on the key. Many African languages use various accents to express tones, nasalization and so on. The uppermost line of the keyboard gives access to such accents, that can be combined virtually with any letter.

West African languages are written with alphabets that comprize non classical Latin characters. It is possible to design virtual keyboards which allow the writing of such special characters with a combination of keys. During the last decade, many different virtual keyboards had been created, without any standardization to fix the correspondence between each character and the keys to press to obtain it. We define a grid to evaluate such keyboards and apply it to five virtual keyboards in relation with the five main languages of Niger (Fulfulde, Hausa, Kanuri, Songhai-Zarma, Tamashek), Bambara and Soninke from Mali and Dyoula from Burkina Faso. We conclude hat the African LLACAN keyboard should be recommended in Niger because it covers all the characters used in the alphabets of the main languages of this country, it produces valid Unicode codes and it minimizes the number of keys to be pressed.