John Hudson The Latin script alphabets of indigenous languages in North America vary considerably, but tend to be strongly phonetic, representing spoken language very directly. This has led to many of them incorporating letters and diacritics beyond those found in European alphabets. This presentation introduces this set of characters and considers them as design objects in terms of aesthetics, legibility, and technical implementation.
A new open-source font project is introduced in the context of the broader activities of font makers, keyboard developers, data localization and encoding experts, and researchers committed to improving digital support for indigenous languages. The fonts are intended as both practical typographic tools and as a conversation starter: a point of contact between indigenous language keepers and font and software developers.
The presentation also considers the fruitfulness, on the one hand, and limitations, on the other, of applying typographic knowledge from the European tradition to North American indigenous alphabets. To what extent are aesthetic canons and notions of good design—whether founded in renaissance book printing or high modernism—relevant to the typography of indigenous languages? Can the representation of indigenous sounds be integrated in the forms of European typography, or should those forms adapt around the letters and signs of these North American alphabets? In considering such questions, might we learn to look at the Latin script in new ways?