UNTIL RECENTLY, MEMBERS OF THE Indigenous Canadian communities of Dakelh, in British Columbia, and Nattilingmiut Inuit, in Nunavut, were limited in how they reproduced their languages on digital platforms. The problem: Many of the syllabic characters they use were either overlooked or inaccurately rendered when they were encoded, back in 1999, into the Unicode Standard, which supports the exchange of digital text across word processors, email, and instant messaging services. A broad swath of the characters used to write the Dakelh (or Carrier) language were incorrectly represented, making them illegible to the already small number of Dakelh speakers. Meanwhile, members of the Nattilingmiut community, who speak an Inuktut dialect called Nattilingmiutut, were missing 12 of their 138 syllabic characters entirely. “Because our writing system is 100% phonetic, if it’s not…
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Fast Company (Digital) - 1 Issue, October 2022