Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
writing system for indigenous North American languages created in 1840 CE
Canadian syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of writing systems used with a number of indigenous Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Eskaleut, and (formerly) Athabaskan language families. These languages had no formal writing system previously. They are valued for their distinctiveness from the Latin script and for the ease with which literacy can be achieved. For instance, by the late 19th century the Cree had achieved what may have been one of the highest rates of literacy in the world. Despite the name, the script is an abugida, where glyphs represent consonant–vowel pairs, determined by the rotation of the glyphs. They were created by linguist and missionary James Evans working with the Cree and Ojibwe.
Canadian syllabics are currently used to write all of the Cree languages, including Eastern Cree, Plains Cree, Swampy Cree, Woods Cree, and Naskapi. They are used regionally for the other large Canadian Algonquian language, Ojibwe, as well as for Blackfoot. Among the Athabaskan languages further to the west, syllabics have been used at one point or another to write Dakelh (Carrier), Chipewyan, Slavey, Tłı̨chǫ (Dogrib), and Dane-zaa (Beaver). Syllabics have occasionally been used in the United States by communities that straddle the border.
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This entry incorporates text from “Canadian Aboriginal syllabics” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.