How Widespread are Syllabics?
I recently did some research on Canadian Aboriginal syllabics and its
history and use in the Ojibwa, Cree and Inuit language families (in order
make an adaptation of syllabics for Toki
Pona). While reading up on the subject, I got curious about the spread of
the writing system: How did it move across the continent? And how many of the
aboriginal languages of North America ended up using syllabics? (And how many
speakers?)
This page is my starting point at finding the answers to those questions.
The first thing I’ve creating making language family trees for the North
American aboriginal languages, and highlighting (in bold) the
languages that use syllabics (to at least some degree).
The Algic Language Family.1
The Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit Language Family.1
The Eskimo–Aleut Language Family.1
Notes
Black nodes (leaf nodes, along the right side)
represent languages, while gray (branch) nodes represent language
families (dialects are not included in the diagrams). Bold is used
to indicate that a language is written
using Canadian
Aboriginal syllabics (though, for some of these languages, the Latin
alphabet is also used).
Language relationship data is taken
from Glottolog, while information on which
languages use syllabics is gathered from a multitude of sources,
primarily the Canadian
Aboriginal syllabics’ Unicode charts (with
extensions: 1
and 2)
and Wikipedia.