Raina Kama (Hausa)
Script details
Section titled “Script details”See all script details: code, region, status and more
| Code | x-hausa-raina-kama |
| Script type | alphabet |
| Region | African |
| Status | Historical |
| Direction | LTR |
| Baseline | bottom |
| Case | no |
| White space | unspecified |
| Complex behaviors | none |
| OpenType code | unspecified |
| ISO 15924 Number | none |
Script description
Section titled “Script description”Raina Kama was the name of a soyayya (love stories) writers’ circle which was formed as part of an “explosion of cultural productions” (Barber, p430) in Nigeria between about 1987 and 2000.
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During this period, a number of young writers, possibly in response to a recent influx of Bollywood films and English-language romance novels, began producing soyayya literature which was unlike previous genres of Hausa prose writing. These books tended to be no more than 100 pages and until the late 1990s were associated with particular writers’ circles to which the authors belonged.
Raina Kama was one of the main writers’ circles. They tended to write in the Arabic or the Latin scripts, but in an effort to strengthen Hausa culture, they also promoted the use of a new alphabetic orthography using signs that were unlike either Arabic or Latin characters. Some early texts published by Raina Kama included a few handwritten pages in this script, although it never became popular. The script is not believed to be in current use.
This script is not currently recognized by the ISO 15924 standard
, but is included in Writing Systems Technical Resources for research purposes. If you have any information on this script, please add the information to this site. Your contributions can be a great help in refining and expanding the ISO 15924 standard. The Script Encoding Initiative is working to support the inclusion of this script in the standard, and contributions here will support their efforts.
Languages that use this script
Section titled “Languages that use this script”There are no known languages that use this script.
Unicode status
Section titled “Unicode status”The Raina Kama (Hausa) script is not yet in Unicode. The script has not yet been added to the Roadmap to the SMP for the Unicode Standard.
Resources
Section titled “Resources”External links
Bibliography
- Barber, Karin. “Innovation and Persistence”. Africa’s hidden histories: everyday literacy and making the self, Redwood Books, 1995, pp. 428-431.
- Furniss, Graham. “Documenting Hausa Popular Literature”. School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.