Two teenage brothers invented a working alphabet in about six months

In 1989, Guinean brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry, then 14 and 10, designed a new script for their language, Pular, because Arabic letters captured its sounds poorly. They named it Adlam, an acronym meaning 'the alphabet that protects the peoples from vanishing,' taught it to family and neighbours by hand, and decades later saw it added to the Unicode standard and used across West Africa.

— Ibrahima Barry, Abdoulaye Barry, Adlam script — Nzérékoré, Guinea, 1989