Cherokee, Osage, and the Indigenous North American Type Collection

After five years of community-partnered research with First Nations and Inuit communities in Canada and the United States, Typotheque is proud to announce the release of new Cherokee and Osage script fonts. Accompanying these is the Indigenous North American Type Collection, a large set of fonts that support the Indigenous communities in North America and their unique writing systems, in terms of digital access, use, and local typographic needs.

Typotheque Cherokee Project

In late 2022, Typotheque and Cherokee Nation citizen and type designer Chris Skillern (Tulsey Type) began working on the Typotheque Cherokee project, the aim of which was the creation of new fonts for the Cherokee Syllabary. Significant research has gone into developing the fonts, including the history, contemporary usage, and conventions of the syllabary, in order to provide today’s readers with a cohesive typographic experience based on how they perceive the writing system.

Chris has drawn on his own experience and intimate knowledge of the Cherokee Syllabary, while working in conjunction with Cherokee community language and design experts Roy Boney Jr and Jeff Edwards of the Cherokee Language Centre in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. This collaboration has resulted in a suite of new typefaces: November Cherokee, November Stencil Cherokee, October Cherokee, and Lava Cherokee.

Additionally, Chris has written this comprehensive article to describe the design and research process that led to the new typefaces.

The TPTQ Club Cherokee crowdfunder

Working on digitally disadvantaged languages is inevitably an in-depth process, and projects in this space require both time and care when working in close collaboration with Indigenous community members. Like many such ventures, the Cherokee project required more time and resources than originally anticipated. Typotheque funds projects like this entirely from its custom font work and retail font revenue; however, being a small company, secondary funding support is often helpful in order to ensure the long-term success and impact of a project.

Therefore, during the course of the Cherokee project, the Typotheque Club was launched, not only to connect type users and makers in a digital, global space, but also to provide a platform for crowdfunding support for projects such as this one. The Cherokee crowdfunding campaign was the first of this kind run by Typotheque and the Club, and it proved a success, helping the project reach its finish line in the requisite timescales. This could not have been achieved without the wonderful support of the campaign’s backers, to whom we are very grateful!

Typotheque Osage Project

In the summer of 2023, Typotheque began working on a new book, Typotheque Indigenous North American Type, which aimed to present both the Indigenous language support in Typotheque fonts and the research behind the project. At the time of publishing this book, there was still one active North American Indigenous script to be worked on: the Osage script (𐓏𐓘𐓻𐓘𐓻𐓟 𐒻𐓟).

Osage is a novel writing system in the same manner as the Cherokee Syllabary or Syllabics in Canada, but it appeared much more recently than these two scripts: in the 21st century rather than the 19th — specifically, 2006. Despite its young age, Osage has enjoyed a rapid ascent in terms of digital text support at the Unicode Standard level as well as text input on major operating system platforms. However, what Osage has been lacking in its digital text ecosystem is a refinement of the typographic structure of the script and access to higher-quality typefaces for the community to work with.

In fall 2023, Dr Jessica Harjo, an interdisciplinary artist and designer and member of the Osage Nation, began collaborating with Typotheque’s Kevin King on a new project to research the typography of the Osage alphabet, examine its structure, and work towards developing a more harmonious typography through the creation of new typefaces. Dr Harjo has been involved with the development of the Osage script from its early infancy, both as part of the community team that successfully secured publication of the writing system in the Unicode Standard in v9.0, and in the early development of Osage typography and typefaces. During the Typotheque Osage project, Jessica and Kevin worked together to gain an understanding of the essential and inherent attributes of the Osage orthography and its digital text processing requirements, in order to create a more consistent and cohesive typographic page for the script. To learn more about the investigations undertaking and the details of the design process, please see our recent article In support of Osage typography.

The results of this work — just as in the Cherokee project — has been the completion of a suite of new typefaces for the Osage script: November Osage, November Stencil Osage, October Osage, and Lava Osage.

An Indigenous North American Type Collection from Typotheque

Five years ago, Typotheque began working on a project whose aim was to comprehensively research and develop new typefaces for the Syllabics, an Indigenous writing system that first appeared in print in the 1840s in what is now Canada. The goals of this project were ambitious: to identify and address any technological barriers that First Nations or Inuit communities were experiencing when using this script — whether at the encoding level or at the operating system and device level; to document local typographic preferences and typographic practices; and to produce a set of new fonts that would incorporate the results of this research, enriching the typographic experience for users. The key parameter was to work in collaboration with local language keepers and experts in their respective Syllabics, and the result was the Syllabics project, published in 2022. Not only did the project achieve the above goals, delivering meaningful impact to local Indigenous communities using this script, but it also laid the foundation for a much broader research and design programme that would encompass all of the Indigenous languages in North America and their writing systems.

With the joint launch today of the Cherokee and Osage font projects, Typotheque is proud to present a first: a complete collection of fonts for all of the Indigenous languages in North America, their typographies, and their respective writing systems across the Latin, Cherokee, Syllabics, and Osage scripts. This collection provides fonts that offer accurate and complete rendering for all orthographies, in the user’s preferred typographic representations. It is the product of five years of community-partnered work and has resulted in extensions to the November, October, and Lava typefaces. Yet it has produced so much more than the typefaces themselves: multiple successful proposals to the Unicode Standard that have significantly changed the digital text standards for these languages; public documentation and knowledge that improves the ability for all font makers to develop Syllabics fonts; meaningful community partnerships that are reciprocal, active, and ongoing; and a research programme, Typotheque Indigenous North American Type, which carries this work forward to address the issues that still require solutions.

Proposing character additions and revisions to the Unicode Standard

Early in the Syllabics project, Typotheque noticed that the Nattilingmiutut language (ᓇᑦᕠᓕᖕᒥᐅᑐᑦ) of Western Nunavut appeared to be missing 12 Syllabics characters that their orthography required but that were not available for input within the Unicode Standard. Typotheque and the Nattilik community worked together to develop a proposal that was successful in requesting the addition of these 12 Syllabics to the Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (UCAS) script in Unicode. These were published in version 14.0 of the Standard in September 2021, and this was followed by a collaboration with the Dakelh (ᑕᗸᒡ) community of central British Columbia to revise the glyph representations of their Syllabics characters in the UCAS code charts.

While Typotheque continued to work on the development of the Syllabics typefaces, in 2022 it also began to focus on the First Nations languages in North America that used a Latin script orthography. During this phase of the work, Typotheque became aware that the Haíɫzaqvḷa (Heiltsuk) community of Bella Bella, British Columbia, lacked the option to input the capital letter equivalent of ƛ or ꟛ in Unicode Text for their Latin script-based orthography. This led to Typotheque working in collaboration with the Haíɫzaqv Nation to successfully request the addition of two new capital letters to the Unicode Standard in the Latin script (Ꟛ and Ƛ), which were formally [published in version 16.0 in September 2024.

Typotheque Indigenous North American Type Research Project

Typotheque went on to launch the Typotheque Indigenous North American Type research project, a collaborative research project to overcome digital language support barriers for Indigenous North American typography, whose aim was also to extend the impact of work already undertaken in this field.

The project comprised a team of researchers experienced in digital language support initiatives with First Nations communities and was launched by the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the Haíɫzaqv Nation and Typotheque, creating a formal partnership. The two parties worked together to ensure that both updated keyboard and font tools would be ready for the release of the new letters Ꟛ and Ƛ, and to prepare materials and information for the community that would explain the changes and raise awareness of them among users.

Writing Systems in North America

There is an incredible amount of linguistic diversity within the Indigenous languages in North America and the writing systems that they employ.

There are four main scripts in use in this space — Latin, Cherokee, Syllabics, and Osage — with rendering requirements and typographic conventions that require special attention from supporting typefaces.

North American Latin

Many Indigenous languages in North America use the Latin script, often mixing characters from transcription and Greek scripts and requiring complex diacritic rendering support. The term North American Latin is used to describe the requirements of all languages in North America that employ a Latin script-based orthography, in particular the Indigenous languages which have requirements that are distinct from European languages covered in Standard Latin script font support.

Typotheque provides a localised and distinct North American Latin script build,  for fonts in the North American Collection, that prioritises the needs of Indigenous language communities. This build covers the typographic requirements for the majority of First Nations language readers. Regionally specific glyph preferences can be added to this build when ordering fonts. The North American Latin build does not change English, French, Spanish, or other Western European languages.

Cherokee

The Cherokee syllabary (ᏣᎳᎩ) is the first phonetic writing system developed in what is now North America, created in the early 19th century by Sequoyah (ᏍᏏᏉᏯ), a Cherokee silversmith and scholar. The original syllabary consists of 85 characters (later expanded to 86), each corresponding to a syllable in the Cherokee language, with no diacritical marks required. Sequoyah completed the syllabary in approximately 1821 and within a few years, a large portion of the Cherokee population had become literate in their own language. The typographic form of Cherokee diverged rather rapidly in the decades after Sequoyah’s initial handwritten presentation of the script, as type founders on the East Coast of the United States cut and provided new typefaces in the script. Sequoyah’s initial syllabary was unicase; however, type foundries introduced lowercase letters in the mid-19th century, and recent efforts have added a subsequent range of lowercase letter characters to the Unicode Standard to match the capitals. The Cherokee syllabary was also an inspiration for the development of other writing systems for First Nations and Inuit languages in North America, such as the Syllabics in the mid-to-late 19th century and the Osage alphabet developed in the mid-2000s, respectively.

Algonquian & Inuktut Syllabics

The Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (UCAS) encoded in the Unicode Standard provides a generalised Standard Syllabics character set for digital text input in a wide range of Indigenous languages. This repertoire provides glyph representations required by users of the Eastern Nunavut Inuktut Syllabics, as well as Algonquian Syllabics (Eastern and Western Cree, Naskapi, and Ojibway Syllabics).

Cree Syllabics (ᒐᐦᑭᐯᐦᐃᑲᓇ) were first printed in 1841 at ᑭᓄᓭᐏ ᓰᐱᐩ (Norway House, Manitoba) and are divided into Western and Eastern orthographic systems. Ojibway Syllabics (ᐊᓂᔑᓇᐯᒧᐎᐣ) were first written in the 1830s near present-day Rice Lake, Ontario, providing an orthographic pattern for Cree Syllabics that were later printed in 1841 at ᑭᓄᓭᐏ ᓰᐱᐩ. Naskapi Syllabics (ᐃᔪᐤ  ᐃᔨᒧᐅᓐ) were developed in the 1980s by the local community in ᑲᐛᐛᒋᑲᒪᒡ (Kawawachikamach, Québec). Inuktut Syllabics (ᖃᓂᐅᔮᖅᐸᐃᑦ) were first used in 1855 and continue to be used to write most dialects of ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ Inuktut (Inuktitut).

Some dialects of Inuktut, such as Nunavik (ᓄᓇᕕᒻᒥᐅᑎᑐᑦ) and Nattilik (ᓇᑦᕠᓕᖕᒥᐅᑐᑦ) Inuktut, respectively, have regional glyph variants that differ from the standard Unicode equivalents, but that readers in those communities expect to see in their typography:

Dakelh Syllabics (ᑐᑊᘁᗕᑋᗸ)

The Dakelh Syllabics — developed in 1885 — are related to the Algonquian and Inuktut Syllabics in their orthographic behaviour, yet are distinct in the vertical positioning of the finals characters at the mid line in relation to the larger syllabics glyphs, and the majority of character forms are significantly different.

Just as the Cyrillic script is a separate writing system from Latin, these two writing systems behave according to the same general set of principles, with some characters even sharing identical graphical representations. However, each is a unique and distinct script, and hence, while covered in the UCAS, Dakelh Syllabics’ orthographic and typographic requirements ought to be taken into account in font development.

Osage 𐓏𐓘𐓻𐓘𐓻𐓟 𐓣𐓟

The Osage script is an alphabetic writing system specifically created for the Osage language by Dr Herman Mongrain Lookout and spoken by the Osage Nation in present-day Oklahoma. Dr Lookout developed the script in the early 2000s, with the Osage Nation officially adopting it in 2006. One of the primary motivations behind the creation of the script was to support language revitalisation. The Osage Nation sought a writing system that would help distinguish and preserve their language, culture, and identity, and in particular engage younger generations to reclaim fluency. While some characters may resemble Latin letters, they are uniquely assigned and tailored to the phonology of the Osage language. Osage script contains a range of diacritical marks that are used for both basic and glottalised consonants, and these diacritics are often used in combinations for marking distinct phonetic elements. This means that Osage fonts need to handle complex shaping of these marks in digital Unicode text. Osage was published in version 9.0 of the Unicode Standard in 2016 after a proposal was developed by the community alongside script encoding experts. Access to the input of the script is now widely available on most digital devices.

Next Steps

While this marks a milestone in the success of the Typotheque research and design programme, the work is not finished yet. There are still more areas to address in relation to Indigenous languages in North America. The Typotheque Indigenous North American Type research team continues to work with Indigenous communities in North America to address language support issues and better understand their local typographic preferences.

Font development work in this space continues to accelerate, with versions of the Zed Text and Display Syllabics fonts becoming available for pre-release preview to Typotheque Club members this fall (join the Club here, it's free!) and much more planned. We look forward to sharing more of this work as it continues and extending the scope of our language support work.