Skip Navigation Home Search Contact

Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

With the emergance of Standards based Unicode font support in modern browsers, web developers can create content for specialized groups of individuals, including Canada's Northern Aboriginal peoples.

History

The core of the script now known as "Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics" was first conceived in the mind of one James Evans in the early 1800s. Evans, a Wesleyan (Methodist) missionary stationed on the western shore of Hudson's Bay in the mid 1800's, wanted to give the local Ojibwe population the ability to read the Bible in their own language. He certainly was well prepared for the task, previously devising a Latin-based script for the native American language Ojibwe, and was also knowledgeable in Devanagari and Shorthand scripts. Around 1830, Evans devised a new syllabary for the Cree language. The new script was widely accepted although several Cree legends treat the writing system as originally Cree (or Blackfoot). There may be some truth to the notion that Evans actually "borrowed" his system from the Cree themselves. One legend has the writing system given to both a western and eastern elder simultaneously as a gift from the Great Spirit, and another has a single Blackfoot family shunned by the community out of distrust with their ability to write. None-the-less, over the years, Evan's script was gradually extended to support many other indigenous, North American languages. Eventually, this system of writing came to be known as "Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics". Today, it supports a broad range of languages belonging to the Algonquian, Athabascan, and Inuit families. In the recently declared (1999) Canadian region known as the Nunavut Territory, Canadian Syllabics shares the title of "Official Script" with the Latin script, and is used for the writing of the Inuit language.

The Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics is an ISO/W3C Standard:
U+1400 – U+167F   (5120–5759)

As originally devised, the Cree Syllabary was extremely frugal in its use of symbols. The system consisted mainly of symbols representing open syllables, i.e. consonant-vowel pairs. In addition, there are distinct symbols for word-initial - also known as "independent" - vowels, as well as syllable-final consonants. In total, the symbols numbered 76. Evans' minimalist approach is well demonstrated by the symbols for the independent vowels. The four vowels [e], [i], [o], [a] are all represented by the same geometric form (a triangle) rotated in each case to a distinct orientation. This same paradigm of identical shapes in varying orientations made the syllabary easy to learn, resulting in a high rate of literacy among the Cree people. What began as the Cree Syllabary, grew incrementally into the contemporary Canadian Aboriginal Syllabary, consisting of more than 600 symbols.

It is interesting to note that Inuit populations outside the eastern Arctic region do not use the syllabic writing system. Inuit in what is now N.W.T., Labrador Coast and in Alaska use Roman orthography, as well as the Inuit of Greenland (Greenlandic). Siberian Inuit use the Cyrillic script to write Inuktitut. Sadly, the Inuktitut language has fallen into considerable decline where syllabics are not used (with the lone exception of Greenland).

In Canada, the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabic Encoding Committee (CASEC) was formed to include not only Inuktitut syllabics but also all aboriginal syllabic users, both current and historical. The final result (in Unicode 3.0) made its appearance in March 2000 as the Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (UCAS), and allows representation of the Algonquian group of Amerind languages including Aivilik, Athapascan, Atikamek, Blackfoot, Cree, Inuktitut, Naskapi, Nunavik, Nunavut, Ojibwa, Sayisi and Slavey; languages spoken by about 60,000 people in Canada, especially in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, but also including Northern Quebec and Nunavut.

On-line Sources:

Resources

A joint project between various governments (Government of Canada, Province of Quebec, the Kativik Regional Government and the Mokivik Corporation) saw the creation of the www.aipainunavik.com web site, which provides a number of Font downloads as well, including the font AiPaiNutaaq, a unicode font based upon the original AiPaiNunavik, an Aboriginal Syllabic computer font used in Eastern Northern Canada. A Unicode Inuktitut keyboard driver for Windows NT 4, Windows 2000 and Windows XP is available for free download from The Legislative Assembly of Nunavut - Unicode Font Download. Ronald Ogawa of St. Catherines Ontario has also created an Aboriginal Syllabics TTF font - Ballymun RO - which may be downloaded from http://nexus.brocku.ca/rogawa/ucas/install.html. The CreekeysPro package contains, among other things a Unicode font that contains a subset of the Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics set with language support that includes East Cree, the BJCree keyboard layout designed so that the typist uses the standard roman equivalent spelling of the words in order to type in syllabics, the Creebrd keyboard layout follows the Cree Programs one-key-per-character system and more.

Apple have a Last Resort font http://developer.apple.com/fonts/LastResortFont/. It offers a fallback behaviour for characters no glyph can be found for by displaying a glyph which represents the Unicode block it came from - which at least gives you a clue in finding an appropriate font to display it properly. (Thanks to Tom Murphy of Spin Solutions for the tip!). Finally, you may also download directly from this site the following font sets:

Samples of Cree may be found at the Cree Language Reader and Daniel 1:1-21 O.T., and some samples of Inuktitut at the Inuktitut Language Reader and at http://www.assembly.nu.ca/unicode/fonts/index-iu.html. You can find more information at Gavin Nesbitt’s Inuktitut Unicode Tools and Information page and in the Inuktitut Computing and Unicode: A new beginning (PDF file).

If you are not familiar with the characters, they are referenced with a graphical display PDF file at http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1400.pdf.

Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License Creative Commons License