Kwak̕wala is a Northern Wakashan language spoken at the north end of Vancouver Island and adjacent areas on the mainland. There are several dialects, including: G̱ut̕sala (Quatsino Sound), Kwak̕wala (Gilford Island, Knight Inlet, Kwakiutl, Nimpkish), 'Nak̕wala (Northern), and T̕łat̕łasik̕wala (Nahwitti). Liq̓ʷala (Lekwiltok) is often considered a dialect of Kwak̕wala as well, but may warrant separate language status and uses the a different orthography).

The first writing system presented here is the practical orthography as given in Grubb 1977 and updated in Galois 1994. The U'mista Cultural Society uses a modified version of this orthography for that Kwak̕wala dialect, for which it is official. Their website does not write the glottal apostrophe above the consonant (k̓), instead it writes it after (k’). This is a consequence of the difficulty in getting the accent to work online, as their map (in a graphics format) shows the apostrophe above. The Grubb orthography differs from the one given here in that: it has the digraph ‹lh› for the current ‹ł›, the vowels ‹e› and ‹eh› are now ‹a̱› and ‹e›, and it writes ejective stops as ‹k’›, ‹t’›, etc.

The second writing system uses Americanist Phonetic symbols which are commonly used by North American linguists. It is currently in use for at least the southern (Liq̓ʷala) dialect.

Note: There are several Roman Orthography conventions on this site that may require further explanation. On the charts below, there is lots of phonetic terminology that may not be familiar to everyone.