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Africanized versions of the Arabic alphabet are collectively called "Ajami." Much as the Latin-based alphabet is used to write many languages, including English, Ajami is not a language itself, but the alphabetic script used to write a language: Arabic-derived letters to write a non-Arabic-in this case, African-language. "Ajami" derives from the Arabic a'jamiy, which means "foreigner" or, more specifically, "non-Arab." Historically, Arabs used the word to refer to all things Persian or non-Arab, a usage they borrowed from the ancient Greeks. Yet over the last few centuries, across Islamic Africa, "Ajami" came to mean an African language written in Arabic script that was often adapted phonetically to facilitate local usages and pronunciations across the continent, from the Ethiopian highlands in the east to the lush jungles of Sierra Leone in the west. The use of Ajami is tied to the religious spread of Islam. From its beginning, Islam was a literate religion. Iqra' ("read") is the first word of God's revelations to Muhammad that became the Qur'an. Knowledge of Islam meant knowledge of the revealed word of God: the Qur'an. Consequently, wherever Islam went, it established centers of learning, usually attached to mosques, where children learned to read and write Arabic in much the same way that European and American children have often been taught literacy by using the Bible. For members of African societies where oral tradition predominated, Arabic was the first written language to which they had been exposed.

The British Broadcasting System (BBC) World Service recently began producing digital news content in Naijá (Nigerian Pidgin). Though Naijá originated as a pidgin, trade communication between Portuguese and English speakers and natives of the Niger Delta, linguistically-speaking, its modern incarnation is actually a creole exhibiting systematic grammar and syntax. The service will bring language diversity to the news and current affairs that West and Central Africa audiences receive, where Pidgin is one of the most widely-spoken languages. The decision to make the service digital only was based on the fact that African people prefer to read content on their mobile phones. Itʻs also interesting to note the transformation of Pidgin, once solely an oral language, into standardized text-based language.