Wadaad's writing is the Somali language

Somali language

The Somali language is a member of the East Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Its nearest relatives are Afar and Oromo. Somali is the best documented of the Cushitic languages, with academic studies beginning before 1900....

 written with the Arabic script. Originally, it referred to "an ungrammatical Arabic containing some Somali words," as used by Somali

Somali people

Somalis are an ethnic group located in the Horn of Africa, also known as the Somali Peninsula. The overwhelming majority of Somalis speak the Somali language, which is part of the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family...

 religious men (wadaads) to write qasida

Qasida

The qaṣīdaᵗ , in Arabic: قصيدة, plural qasā'id, قــصــائـد; in Persian: قصیده , is a form of lyric poetry that originated in preIslamic Arabia...

s, and by merchants for business, letter writing, and to draft petition

Petition

A petition is a request to do something, most commonly addressed to a government official or public entity. Petitions to a deity are a form of prayer....

s. Throughout the ages, various Somali scholars improved this form of writing.

Evolutionary history

The Arabic script was first introduced in the 13th century by Sheikh Yuusuf bin Ahmad al-Kawneyn (colloquially referred to as Aw Barkhadle or the "Blessed Father") of Ashraaf

Ashraaf

Ashraaf comes from Arabic and is the plural form of Sharif or Shareef , which literally means "noble" or "privileged". In some countries it used as a term to denote descendants of Muhammed . Among South Asian Muslims it used as a term for the Muslim gentry in South Asia, usually claiming Arab or...

 descent to advance the teaching of the Qur'an

Qur'an

The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...

. Al-Kawneyn devised a Somali nomenclature for the Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

 vowels, which enabled his pupils to read and write in Arabic.

Though various Somali wadaads and scholars had used the Arabic script to write in Somali for centuries, it would not be until the 19th century when the Qadiriyyah saint Sheikh Uways al-Barawi would improve the application of the Arabic script to represent Somali. He applied it to the Maay dialect of southern Somalia

Somalia

Somalia , officially the Somali Republic and formerly known as the Somali Democratic Republic under Socialist rule, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. Since the outbreak of the Somali Civil War in 1991 there has been no central government control over most of the country's territory...

, which at the time was the closest to standardizing Somali with the Arabic script.

Muuse Xaaji Ismaaciil Galaal (1917–1980) was a Somali linguist who in the 1950s introduced a more radical alteration of Arabic to represent Somali. Galaal came up with an entirely new set of symbols for the Somali vowels

Somali grammar

Somali is an agglutinative language, using a large number of affixes and particles to determine and alter the meaning of words.-Morphology:As in other related languages, Somali nouns are inflected for gender, number and case....

. Lewis (1958) considered this to be the most accurate Arabic script to have been devised for the Somali language.