Orthography

While Dene and Inuvialuktun languages use Roman orthography, some unique diacritical marks (e.g., ogoneks) and phonetic symbols (e.g., glottal stops and barred ls) are also used that might make transcription with standard typefaces* a bit difficult. Typefaces that support Aboriginal Syllabics are necessary to write Inuktitut.

Unicode Typefaces

Unicode is the international standard character set that encompasses almost all the world’s writing systems. It has been developed over the last two decades by a consortium of leading members of the computing industry.

Various typefaces support unicode to various degrees, retaining only small portions of the full unicode set. However, unicode support is being extended as newer versions of operating systems, applications, and fonts are developed (i.e., Vista/Windows 7 and Mac OS X Leopard/Snow Leopard, as well as Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 offer full unicode support).

Examples of typefaces include:

Euphemia UCAS

Euphemia covers most languages which use the Canadian Syllabic script including various Cree orthographies, Inuktitut and the historical Carrier/Dakelh script (dulkw’ahke). It is available for free from Tiro Typeworks. The Tiro site also details the interesting history of the evolution of Aboriginal syllabics.

Aboriginal Serif/Sans Serif

LanguageGeek (Chris Harvey) offers the Aboriginal Serif/Sans Serif font sets that contain full support for every character variation amongst Canadian Aboriginal languages. Other, even fancier fonts as well as keyboarding and orthography tips are also available from this amazing site.

Other Non-Standard Typefaces

Winmac Dene fonts are used by several organizations in the NWT and can be downloaded to read legacy documents including websites. However, their non-standard coding is obsolete, and has been superceded by unicode typefaces, which code for most aboriginal characters and diacritical marks

Unfortunately, given the dearth of technical and human resources that inhibit progress in the North, the Winmac fonts are only slowly being phased out. Indeed, their persistent use has actually created much confusion, especially when documents coded with these fonts are published to the web. Without the fonts installed on the viewer’s computer, the non-standard coding gives rise to errors in orthography, indicated most noticeably by the appearance of odd characters like å, æ, î, ô, etc. The full list of keystrokes can be downloaded from here.

The Government of Nunavut has made greater progress converting older legacy syllabic fonts to the newer unicode standard. A list of resources can be found here.

While the term “font” is most commonly used to describe different stylized character sets, it is technically used to describe one variant (e.g., bold, italic, oblique, etc.) of a typeface.