A new font to typeset Salish Indigenous languages means so much more than just the words that it will be used to write, one of the people behind its creation says.
“As a Musqueam woman, UBC acknowledging the importance of being able to respectfully represent my language in their space, on my territory, through the branding font that they use, it’s inherently created this space of mutual respect and caring for this language that I spend my whole life working on,” she said.
Leaders chose the North American phonetic alphabet since it offered sounds used in their language that aren’t available with the Latin alphabet used in modern English. “It basically just looks like somebody … kind of crammed something in as an afterthought after the fact, which is really disrespectful of another language,” he said.
The university’s institutional font, used in most of its branded signs and documents, is called Whitney. For years before the creation of Whitney Salishan, Warburton said they would manually design characters in the Musqueam and Syilx languages whenever the university needed them for a project.Now that the new font can be uploaded to university computers, Warburton said he has given out about 100 licences and expects more requests.