All of the languages, except Cherokee, use a modified Roman orthography. The majority of the standard orthographies—at least those used in Canada—stem from the Iroquoianist linguistic tradition.

Cherokee has its own unique syllabic alphabet, and consequently, requires a special keyboard layout. I have included two here: the first is a “type in Roman orthography—get a Syllabics output”. The second is the layout which maps to the old Cherokee Nation font, where each key (shifted and not shifted) produces an individual syllabic. For those who use a Mac, the Cherokee–QWERTY keyboard which comes pre-installed with recent versions of OS X has a number of relatively awkward key assignments and does not correspond to the Cherokee Roman orthography.. Please download and install the Cherokee–Languagegeek keyboard on this page if you are looking for an alternative.

Each language will be provided with two keyboards, one for Mac, and one for Windows.

Multi-lingual keyboards generally keep the standard A–Z keys while the diacritics used by the languages are mapped to punctuation keys. For all the Iroquoian keyboard layouts (except for Mohawk) several letter keys have been remapped. Due to the high frequency of non-English letters in these languages, it is impractical to put all these letters on punctuation keys—such a keyboard for Seneca would have 53% of all keystrokes made by the pinky-finger, not at all ergonomic.

Except for Mohawk, where two choices are given for accent-order, accents are typed after the base letter.

Northern Languages

Mac Download (2.0) — Mac Installation Instructions

Windows Download (2.0) — Windows Installation Instructions

Download Windows

Download Mac

Mac Installation Instructions
Win. Instructions

Old Keyman Keyboard
* (v 6.901) (August 2008)

• Ꮝ is typed S-X (instead of S)
• Ꮳ is typed Z-A (instead of T-S-A)
• Ꮭ is typed R-A (instead of T-L-A)

Last Update: August 18, 2020