@inproceedings{traore-etal-2026-reclaiming,
    title = "Reclaiming {A}frican Voices: Surveying Indigenous Writing Systems for Inclusive {NLP}",
    author = "Traore, Mamady  and
      Le, Ngoc Tan  and
      Sadat, Fatiha",
    editor = "Matfunjwa, Muzi  and
      Setaka, Mmasibidi  and
      Mabuya, Rooweither  and
      van Zaanen, Menno",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of Resources for {A}frican Indigenous Languages ({RAIL}) 2026 @ {LREC} 2026",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma, Mallorca (Spain)",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/cawl-year/2026.rail-1.10/",
    doi = "10.63317/2zgo4ih7o2ch",
    pages = "96--106",
    abstract = "Multilingual NLP has expanded rapidly through large-scale pretraining and cross-lingual transfer, yet this progress remains structurally uneven across writing systems. This survey reframes multilingual NLP around scripts rather than languages, arguing that writing systems constitute an under-theorized axis of computational inequality. Focusing on African scripts {---} Indigenous (Vai, Ge{'}ez, Tifinagh), modern (ADLaM, N{'}Ko), and adapted Arabic-based (Ajami){---}we analyze how script properties interact with digital infrastructure, tokenization, and downstream task performance. We organize the literature across four analytical layers: infrastructural (Unicode and input systems), representational (segmentation efficiency and vocabulary allocation), functional (task-level disparities), and epistemic (evaluation bias and the ``low-resource'' framing). Synthesizing evidence from 47 studies, we show that performance gaps across scripts arise primarily from engineering design choices rather than intrinsic linguistic complexity. We conclude by outlining a research agenda for native multiscript foundation models, including script-aware scaling laws, tokenizer equity metrics, and evaluation reform. We argue that multiscript equity is not a peripheral concern but a structural precondition for genuine multilingual inclusion"
}