The Vai syllabary is a syllabic writing system devised for the Vai language by Momolu Duwalu Bukele of Jondu, in what is now Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia. He is regarded within the Vai community, as well as by most scholars, as the syllabary's inventor and chief promoter when it was first documented in the 1830s. It is one of the two most successful indigenous scripts in West Africa.

In 1967 two scholars, working independently, suggested that the Cherokee syllabary of 1819 provided a model for the design of the Vai syllabary (Tuchscherer 2002). One of them, P.E.H. Hair, suggested that the link was missionary groups working with both peoples. A different link was suggested by Svend Holsoe, who discovered a Cherokee (possibly half-Cherokee) man named Augustus or Austin Curtis who had settled in the Vai region at least four years before the invention of the script. He married into a prominent Vai family and became an important Vai chief himself. The "inscription on a house" that drew the world's attention to existence of the Vai syllabary was in fact on the home of Curtis. Both ideas have been mentioned by various authors since.^[who?] In 2002 Tuchscherer and Hair, in a detailed analysis of the evidence (and noting that the evidence is only circumstantial), wrote: