The N’Ko Alphabet (ߒߞߏ) is an alphabet conceived by the Guinean writer Souleymane Kante in 1949, as a writing system for the Mandé languages of West Africa. In fact, N’Ko means I say in all Mandé languages.
Lo N’Ko has some similarities with the Arabic alphabet, such as the right-to-left direction and the binding between the graphemes. Tones, as well as vowels, must be marked. Its regulatory body is the Kurukan fuwa gbara Association. In 2006 the N’Ko coding was approved in the Unicode 5.0 system, and it was assigned the ISO 15924 code “Nkoo”.
N’Ko is also the name of a language (ISO 639-3: nqo) which represents a literary variety of the Mandé languages: it is intended as a sort of koinè, based on the dialectal continuum of the Mandingo languages (which represent a subset of the Mandè languages ), although mainly affected by the influence of Maninka, the Mandè variety spoken in Guinea.
The N’Ko language is also sometimes transcribed in Arabic or Latin characters, with some additional letters that derive directly from the international phonetic alphabet, such as ɔ or ɛ