Localized Typefaces for North American Indigenous Languages

Name: Localized Typefaces for North American Indigenous Languages
Uploaded: 2023-05-30
Channel: Héctor Mangas
Description: Héctor Mangas presents Typotheque's research and community collaboration efforts to support North American Indigenous languages in the Unicode Standard.

To support the digital preservation of Indigenous languages, Typotheque undertook a comprehensive research project in collaboration with Indigenous communities in Canada and the United States. The project, directed by Kevin King, began with community outreach to understand local Indigenous needs and the technical barriers they faced with digital text.

Research identified that communities like the Nattilik were missing essential characters from the Unicode Standard, preventing them from accurately writing their language digitally. In response, Typotheque worked with language keepers to prepare and submit two successful proposals to Unicode, a process that took two years, to add the missing characters and correct representative glyphs.

This talk discusses the early phases of this process, and introduces the type of community-centered surveys Typotheque develops to understand the preference of users. You can read more about this initiative here.