High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Africa Alphabet (also International African Alphabet or IAI alphabet) was developed in 1928 under the lead of Diedrich Westermann. He developed it with a group of Africanists at the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (later the IAI) in London. Its aim was to enable people to write all the African languages for practical and scientific purposes without diacritics. It is based on the International Phonetic Alphabet with little differences such as j and y, which instead have the same (consonant) sound values as in English.