Syllabics Keyboards

Text Examples:

• North-West Dialect

• Northern Dialect

Ojibway Syllabics

See Glossary for terminology explinations.

In Ontario, Ojibway has two means by which final consonants may be written, called the i-final and a-finals (so named because the finals resemble a small/raised version of the -i or -a syllabic). There are also other choices of final -w and -y. According to the Style Manual for Syllabics, Ojibway a-finals use ᐊᐤ (w) and ᐊᔾ (y), while the i-finals use and ᐊ​ᣜ, ᐊ​ᣝ, or ᐊᐤ (w) and ᐊᐞ (y). In Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, Syllabics may use Western-style finals.  

There is quite a lot of variation in Ojibwe syllabics, please email me if your community is not represented on this chart, or by a languagegeek.com keyboard.

For the foreign sounds /r/ and /l/, two choices are available, either a final ᓬ ᕒ as in my name ᑲᕒᐃᣚ, or a diacritic above an n-series syllabic
ᓀᓫ, ᓀᕑ as in ᑲᓂᕑᔅ.

Often, the decision to use the /h/ final ᐦ and the long vowel diacritic ᐋ is inconsistent. Some speakers fully “point” their texts (i.e. include all finals, /h/s, and long vowels), while other speakers omit some or all of these.

Where Roman orthographies typically put hyphens between preverbs and verb stems, Syllabics texts either write the preverbs as separate words, or write the entire verb complex as a single word.

Last Update: July 13, 2020