Until recently, two Indigenous Canadian communities were limited in how they reproduced their languages on digital platforms. The problem: some of the characters used to digitally represent sounds from these languages (called syllabics) were overlooked or inaccurately rendered when they were encoded into the Unicode Standard—a set of code that underpins digital text, ensuring characters look the same across computers and programs.
His outreach efforts led him to Janet Tamilik McGrath, an Inuktut language consultant who had previously worked with local organizations and Nattilik elder and language keeper Nilaulaaq Aglukkaq to solve the issue of the missing syllabics.
“All the other syllabics that have ever been made for computers, they’re just made and then given to us—so there are spacing issues and other glitches, and we used them anyway but they don’t work that well,” McGrath said. In the late aughts, Nilaulaaq had worked with Attima and Elizabeth Hadlari and another font foundry to create a custom font and keyboard for Natsilingmiutut speakers. But anyone who wanted to use it had to manually load it onto their computer, and it wasn’t supported by any machine without the font and keyboard installed.
“Because our writing system is 100% phonetic, if it’s not written properly, then it can’t be spoken properly,” McGrath says. “It’s a very bright day for [Natsilingmiutut] language transmission that there’s a phonetic system that is consistent with the spoken language.”
Beyond making the font viable, the changes to the Carrier glyph set allowed for accurate phonetic writing of the language—which Prince hopes will make it easier to learn and have fewer divergences over spelling than the version that has been written using the Latin alphabet.
“We’re establishing a way for our language to be represented in a perfect spelling and perfect pronunciation format,” Prince says.
All of the changes to Unicode are supported by the fonts that Typotheque released, though wider support for these changes is ultimately reliant on tech companies adjusting the fonts that they preload into computers and phones. But it’s the biggest step toward widespread digital support for the previously inaccurate and missing syllabics since the initial encoding in 1999.
“The syllabics are actually retaining the spirit of the language,” says Prince, who is developing a curriculum that incorporates the new syllabics glyphs. “I just feel bad we haven’t done this sooner,” he says, “because I see people’s tattoos and there are actually mistakes in them.”
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