Unicode Block - Osmanya

Osmanya is a script invented in the early 20th century by the Somali scholar Osman Yusuf Kenadid, designed to replace the Arabic and Latin scripts previously used for writing the Somali language. It features a left-to-right directionality and a largely phonetic alphabet with distinct letters for vowels and consonants, reflecting the phonology of Somali. This writing system gained some popularity in Somalia before the government adopted a Latin-based orthography in the 1970s, but it remains culturally significant. In digital encoding, Osmanya is assigned its own dedicated section, ensuring that texts in this historical script can be preserved, displayed, and exchanged across modern computing platforms, including support for punctuation and digits specific to the script.