Arctic Keyboards

(Languages in the Eskimo-Aleut family)

Languages of belonging to what linguists call the “Eskimo-Aleut” family are spoken in a territory that spreads across arctic North America. The Inuktitut language of Eastern Canada can be written in either a Syllabic or Roman orthography. The rest of the languages use the Roman orthography alone. Aleut and some Yupik languages also employ a Cyrillic system, historically in Alaska and currently across the Bering Strait in Russia.

The keyboards provided on this site are used with Keyman from Tavultesoft. This program must be downloaded and installed before any of the keyboards will work on your computer. All keyboards (unless otherwise noted) on this site are designed to work with Unicode fonts, and as such, will only work with certain software (e.g. Windows XP, MS Word). See Unicode links page for Unicode friendly software.

Keyman installation instructions

Note: These keyboards are for Unicode fonts only, and even so, some languages use symbols do not appear in the Unicode standard. Because the keyboards follow Unicode completely, they may have problems displaying some characters properly.

This page contains only Unicode characters.

How the Roman/Cyrillic orthography keyboards work:
Keyboard letters that are not used in a language (except for borrowings) have often been reassigned to characters necessary for the language. To access the English letter, type the ¤ key followed by the remapped English key. Using the Iñupiaq-1 keyboard, the f-key produces ŋ (eng). To get standard Latin ‘f’, type ¤ + f. Some may question whether remapping Roman letters to diacritics or other symbols is a good idea. The alternative is to place all these commonly used characters to the right side of the keyboard, usurping the punctuation keys. This is the strategy employed by European language keyboards. However, having spent some time touch typing texts in Native languages, I have found that my right hand pinky-finger has to do far to much work, while ergonomically easy keys are left untouched. For this reason, I feel it makes sense to remap these keys. In the rare instance where the original key glyph is needed, the ¤ key (as discussed above) suffices.

How the Roman/Cyrillic orthography keyboards work:

Keyboard letters that are not used in a language (except for borrowings) have often been reassigned to characters necessary for the language. To access the English letter, type the ¤ key followed by the remapped English key.
- Using the Iñupiaq-1 keyboard, the f-key produces ŋ (eng). To get standard Latin ‘f’, type ¤ + f.
Some may question whether remapping Roman letters to diacritics or other symbols is a good idea. The alternative is to place all these commonly used characters to the right side of the keyboard, usurping the punctuation keys. This is the strategy employed by European language keyboards. However, having spent some time touch typing texts in Native languages, I have found that my right hand pinky-finger has to do far to much work, while ergonomically easy keys are left untouched. For this reason, I feel it makes sense to remap these keys. In the rare instance where the original key glyph is needed, the ¤ key (as discussed above) suffices.