North West Coast Keyboards

All of the languages of the North West Coast (as defined on this site) use a modified Roman orthography, although some have suggested other writing systems for some of these languages (e.g. syllabics for Kwak̓wala). In the Canadian province of British Columbia, there are generally speaking two types of orthography: linguistic and “practical”. The linguistic system for each language uses a local form of Americanist phonetic writing, containing symbols such as: ƛ ʕ kʷ y̓ etc. The practical systems in B.C. tend to try to use only those characters that are on an English typewriter keyboard, although there are often a few extra characters necessary. A few languages in Canada, and more in the U.S.A. have adopted the linguistic orthography as their standard, and thus have no typewriter style “practical orthography”.

Many of these languages have a relatively newly developed practical alphabet which differs significantly from the orthography commonly used by linguists. Where possible and applicable, several keyboards will be available for each language. For more details, see the keyboard maps or language pages.

Each language will be provided with two keyboards, one for Windows and one for Macs. There may also be some “touch-type” keyboards here for download, they are being phased out, but are always available if you contact me directly via email.

Multi-lingual keyboards keep the standard A–Z keys while the special characters used by the languages are mapped to punctuation keys. These keyboards allow for easy typing in both English and the Native langauge at the same time. Accents are typed after the base letter. Multi-lingual keyboards for Windows have been designed in the standard Microsoft Windows key layout file format as well as the Keyman format. The Keyman format has the advantage of a one-click download and install of the keyboard and several Languagegeek.com Unicode fonts. However, Keyman is a third-party software package and there may be technical problems that I cannot address.

The multi-lingual keyboards place accents and special letters only on punctuation keys, so as not to interfere with letters required by English. This way borrowed words or proper names can be typed in a Native language text without switching keyboard layouts. On these keyboards, accents are typed after the letter they modify. Where a punctuation key has been altered, the original value is typed by holding down the RIGHT-ALT (on Windows) or one of the OPTION keys (on Macs) and hitting the punctuation key.