Comorian is most commonly written in Latin alphabet today. Traditionally and historically, Arabic alphabet is used as well but to a lesser extent. Arabic alphabet has been universally known in Comoros, due to the fact that there was a near universal attendance at Quranic schools on the islands, whereas knowledge and literacy in French was lacking. Since independence from
France, the situation has changed, with improvements to infrastructure of secular education, in which French is the language of instruction.
Latin alphabet Note: In
Shimaore, the digraphs " vh " and " bv " are used for representing the phoneme . The 20th century marked the start of a process of orthographic reform and standardization across the
Muslim world. This process included standardizing, unifying, and clarifying the Arabic script in most places, ditching the Arabic script in favour of Latin or Cyrillic in others in places such as
Soviet Turkistan and
Soviet Caucasus, to
Turkey and
Kurdistan, to
Indonesia and
Malaysia, to the Eastern African coast (
Swahili Ajami) and Comoros. The mantle of standardization and improvement of Arabic-based orthography in Comoros was carried by the literaturist
Said Kamar-Eddine (1890-1974) in 1960. Only two decades before, in the 1930s and 1940s, Swahili literaturists such as
Sheikh el Amin and
Sheikh Yahya Ali Omar had developed the Swahili Arabic alphabet as well. In
Swahili, two new diacritics were added to the 3 original
diacritics, namely to represent the phoneme , and to represent the phoneme . Furthermore, the usage of the 3
mater lectionis (or vowel carrier letters) followed the following convention too: Vowels in stressed (
second-to-last) syllable of the word are marked with diacritic as well as a carrier letter, namely
alif for vowel ,
yāʼ for vowels and , and
wāw for vowels and . But, in the proposal by
Said Kamar-Eddine for Comorian, there was a departure from the
Ajami tradition and a divergence from what was done by Swahili literaturists.
Kamar-Eddine had an eye on
Iraqi and
Iranian Kurdistan, and the orthographic reforms implemented there. In Kurdish, the direction of the reforms of the alphabet favoured elimination of all diacriticts and designating specific letters to each and every vowel sound, thus creating a full
alphabet. Kurdish orthography wasn't unique in this regard. A similar direction was pursued in various Turkic languages such as
Uzbek,
Azerbaijani,
Uyghur, and
Kazakh, as well as languages of the Caucasus such as
Western and
Eastern Circassian languages and
Chechen language. This makes
Said Kamar-Eddine orthography for Comorian, a unique case for Sub-saharan African languages that have been written with the Arabic script. In the initial position, the vowels are written as a single letter. No preceding
alif or
hamza is required. (This is similar to the convention of
Kazakh Arabic alphabet) In
Kurdish, new vowel letters were created by adding accents on existing letters. The phonemes and are written with and respectively. In Comorian, new independent letters were assigned instead. The letter
hāʾ in two of its variants are used for both aforementioned phonemes. A standard Arabic
hāʾ, in all its 4 positional shapes () is used for the vowel . This is a unique innovation exclusive to this orthography. The letter
hāʾ in these shapes is not used as vowel in any other Arabic orthography. A letter
hāʾ, in a fixed
medial zigzag shape (medial form of what's known in Urdu as
gol he) () is used for the vowel . The usage of this variant of the letter
hāʾ as a vowel is not unique to Comorian. In the early 20th century,
West and
East Circassian Arabic orthography also used this variant of the letter
hāʾ to represent the vowel (written as
ы in Cyrillic). Letters representing consonant phonemes that are not present in Arabic have been formed in either of the two following methods. First method is similar to
Persian and
Kurdish, where new letters are created by adding or modifying of dots. The second method is to use the Arabic gemination diacritic
Shaddah on letters that are most similar to the missing consonant phoneme. This is similar to the tradition of
Sorabe (Arabo-Malagasy) orthography, where a geminated
r () is meant to represent or , and where a geminated
f () is meant to represent or . There are two types of
vowel sequencees in Comorian, a glide or a vowel hiatus. Latin letters
w and
y, represented by and , are considered semivowels. When these letters follow another vowel, they are written sequentially. Other succession of vowels are treated as
vowel hiatus. In these instances, a
hamza () is written in between.
Prenasalized consonants are written as digraphs, with either
m () or
n ().
Sample text Comorian Latin Alphabet: • Ha mwakinisho ukaya ho ukubali ye sheo shaho wo ubinadamu piya pvamwedja ne ze haki za wadjibu zaho usawa, zahao, uwo ndo mshindzi waho uhuria, no mlidzanyiso haki, ne amani yahe duniya kamili. ''Comorian Arabic (Kamar-Eddine's) Alphabet'': • == Grammar ==