Microsoft digitizes a teen-made West African alphabet — ADLaM wins Cannes Design GP

In 1989, in Nzérékoré, Guinea, brothers Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry — aged 10 and 14 — shut themselves in their room and drew shapes on paper until they had invented an alphabet for their native language, Fulfulde (Pulaar). Pulaar was spoken by tens of millions of Fulani people across West Africa but had never had its own writing system; people improvised with Arabic letters, and letters were routinely misread.

Decades later the handwritten alphabet, named ADLaM — an acronym meaning 'the alphabet that will prevent a people from being lost' — reached Microsoft. The company encoded it in Unicode, worked with the brothers and type designers to create the ADLaM Display typeface, and shipped it in Windows 10 (May 2019 update), Office and mobile platforms, so Pulaar speakers could type, text, email and browse in their own script.

At Cannes Lions 2023 the project won two Grand Prix — Design and Creative Business Transformation — for McCann New York and Microsoft. Microsoft's chief brand officer described the result as an entire culture now able to participate in the digital economy; the brothers reported ADLaM learning centers opening across Africa, Europe and the US, with children increasingly learning the script their older relatives created.

The campaign is remembered not as an ad but as an infrastructure decision: a company using its platform to preserve a language instead of marketing to its speakers in another tongue.