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The book consists of five parts including a history of how the Somali language was written. In the first chapter the writer discusses that early Somali language made use of an Arabic script, but there were also a number of indigenous writing systems such as the Osmanya script, which was created by Osman Yusuf Kenadid and the Kaddare script, which was invented by Sheikh Hussein Sheikh Ahmed Kaddare. The second chapter deals with Somali works written before 1900, between 1900 and 1950 and after 1950. The works treated in this chapter are written in Arabic or in one of the other Somali scripts, written by those who worked for the colonial administration and who could speak the Somali language, as well as documents written in the Latin script by the instigators who first attempted to turn Somali into a written language. The third chapter is about the committee that dealt with the creation of the Somali Latin Alphabet. Although the committee was formed in 1961, the official writing script was formally introduced in Somalia in 1972. The fourth chapter is about the process of writing Somali books, but also about teaching the new alphabet to the population. The fifth and last chapter is about the different forms of literature that have been used to welcome and embrace the new alphabet, such as poems and songs. [ASC Leiden abstract].