page_title: Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
section_title: Carrier and other Athabaskan
hierarchical_section_title: Canadian Aboriginal syllabics / Derived scripts / Carrier and other Athabaskan
caption_attribution_description: Page from a prayer book using the Carrier , depicting part of the ten commandments
context_page_description: Canadian syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of abugidas created by James Evans to write a number of indigenous Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Inuit, and Athabaskan language families, which had no formal writing system previously. They are valued for their distinctiveness from the Latin script of the dominant languages and for the ease with which literacy can be achieved; indeed, by the late 19th century the Cree had achieved what may have been one of the highest rates of literacy in the world.
  Canadian syllabics are currently used to write all of the Cree languages from Naskapi to the Rocky Mountains, including Eastern Cree, Woods Cree, Swampy Cree and Plains Cree. They are also used to write Inuktitut in the eastern Canadian Arctic; there they are co-official with the Latin script in the territory of Nunavut. They are used regionally for the other large Canadian Algonquian language, Ojibwe, as well as for Blackfoot, where they are obsolete. Among the Athabaskan languages further to the west, syllabics have been used at one point or another to write Dakelh, Chipewyan, Slavey, Tłı̨chǫ and Dane-zaa.
context_section_description: Athabaskan syllabic scripts were developed in the late 19th century by French Roman Catholic missionaries, who adapted this originally Protestant writing system to languages radically different from the Algonquian languages.  Most Athabaskan languages have more than four distinct vowels, and all have many more distinct consonants than Cree.  This has meant the invention of a number of new consonant forms. Whereas most Athabaskan scripts, such as those for Slavey and Chipewyan, bear a reasonably close resemblance to Cree syllabics, the Carrier (Dakelh) variant is highly divergent, and only one series – the series for vowels alone – resembles the original Cree form.
  To accommodate six distinctive vowels, Dakelh supplements the four vowel orientations with a dot and a horizontal line in the rightward pointing forms: ᐊ a, ᐅ ʌ, ᐈ e, ᐉ i, ᐃ o, and ᐁ u.
  One of the Chipewyan scripts is more faithful to western Cree. (Sayisi Chipewyan is substantially more divergent.) It has the nine forms plus the western l and r series, though the rotation of the l- series has been made consistently counter-clockwise. The k- and n- series are more angular than in Cree: ki resembles Latin "P". The c series has been reassigned to dh. There are additional series: a regular ch series (ᗴ cha, ᗯ che, ᗰ chi, ᗱ cho), graphically a doubled t; and an irregular z series, where ze is derived by counter-clockwise rotation of za, but zi by clockwise rotation of zo:
  Other series are formed from dh or t. A mid-line final Cree t preceding dh forms th, a raised Cree final p following t forms tt, a stroke inside t forms tth (ᕮ ttha), and a small t inside t forms ty (ᕳ tya). Nasal vowels are indicated by a following Cree final k.
  All Athabaskan syllabic scripts are now obsolescent.
caption: A page from a prayer book written in the Carrier syllabics, an Athabascan adaptation of Canadian Aboriginal syllabic writing
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