The Pulaar project

• Thematic framework: Multilingualism and Cyberspace
• Geographical outreach: International
• Types of project: Disseminating information
  
  
• Beneficiary countries:
  - Mauritania
  - Guinée
  - Mali
  - Sierra Leone
  - Niger
  - Burkina Faso
  
  

• Main responsible:
  Ibrahima SARR
  10, Allée D'Avranches - Appt 111
  76610 Le Havre
  France
  

Summary of the activities
With the absence of pulaar/fulfulde on the internet, my team and I have set up a website entirely written and updated in pulaar. Our objective is to give pulaar readers news and other features on the internet.

I have been researching on Pulaar digitizing and codification for the last twelve years. Pulaar is a great language to learn and analyse since it has very complex structures that add spice to any linguistic or semantic project work. Unfortunately, people like me are usually isolated and cannot coordinate their work
with other people in other parts of the world since governments' policies in different West African countries often give very poor attention to the development of National languages.

In the last decade or so, the crucial problem of Pulaar scholars was typing and displaying Pulaar correctly on computers. Ten years ago, I discovered a program called "Type Designer" which could be used to create fonts and to map the characters freely to any type of keyboard. I was so excited!! I bought the
program and got to work immediately!!

I had no graphic skills at that time and did not know how to ceate fonts from scratch. What I did was edit existing fonts from my computer and add Pulaar characters that did not exist in the given font. Then, I was able to map characters to specific keys on my keyboard. I modified a dozen fonts and gave them the same names with the prefix "Peul" which gave names like PeulArial, PeulTimesNewRoman, etc. You have probably seens those fonts since they are widely and freely used in many countries.

Main partners
We are looking for partnership with local radio in West Africa and press agencies thoughout the world for news sources.