Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources

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Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

U+1400 – U+167F   (5120–5759)

Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics were introduced with version 3.0 of the Unicode Standard and allow representation of the Algonquian group of Amerind languages (including Atikamek, Blackfoot, Cree, Naskapi and Ojibwa), the Athapascan languages (including Carrier and Slavey), and the Inuktitut languages (including Aivilik, Inuit, Nunavik, Nunavut and Sayisi). Additional Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics characters can be found in the Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics Extended range. You can find some samples of Cree at the Cree Language Reader and Daniel 1:1-21 O.T., and some samples of Inuktitut at the Inuktitut Language Reader and at http://www.assembly.nu.ca/unicode/fonts/index-iu.html. You can find more information at Gavin Nesbitt’s Inuktitut Unicode Tools and Information page and in the Inuktitut Computing and Unicode: A new beginning PDF file.

Microsoft Windows incorporates support for Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics Unicode from Windows Vista onwards.

A Unicode Inuktitut keyboard driver for Windows NT 4, Windows 2000 and Windows XP is available for free download from The Legislative Assembly of Nunavut - Unicode Font Download. Another free Windows keyboard driver is available from Nunavik Syllabics File Downloads.

Mac OS X 10.3 includes support for Unicode Inuktitut. For users of Macintosh OS X 10.2, a commercial Inuktitut Language Kit with a Unicode font and 2 keyboard layouts is available from XenoType Technologies. Another commercial Inuktitut input method for OS X 10.2 is available from Everson Typography.

The characters that appear in the first column of the following table depend on the browser that you are using, the fonts installed on your computer, and the browser options you have chosen that determine the fonts used to display particular character sets, encodings or languages.

You can find some or all of the characters in this range in the Windows Unicode fonts Aboriginal Sans, Aboriginal Serif, AiPaiNutaaq, Ballymun RO, BJCree Uni, CBSUCAS, Code2000, DejaVu Sans, DejaVu Sans Condensed, Euphemia, Euphemia CAS, EversonMono, Kayases, Kisiska, Marin, Masinahikan, Masinahikan Dene, NunacomU, OskiBlackfoot, OskiDakelh, OskiDeneA, OskiDeneB, OskiDeneC, OskiDeneS, OskiEast, OskiWest, Pigiarniq, Pitabek, Sun-ExtA and Uqammaq; in the Macintosh OS X Unicode fonts AiPaiNutaaq, BJCree Uni and Euphemia UCAS; and in the Unix Unicode font ClearlyU.

To see exactly which characters are included in a particular Windows font, you can use a utility such as Andrew West’s BabelMap, or WunderMoosen’s FontChecker.

If you are not familiar with the characters, you can check the characters displayed here with the graphical display at http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1400.pdf.

Copyright © 1999–2009 Alan Wood

The hexadecimal numbers and the character names in the above table are taken from the Unicode 5.2.0 Character Database, Copyright © 1991–2009 Unicode, Inc., as contained in UnicodeData.txt on the Unicode Web site (http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/) in October 2009.

Created 4th October 1999   Last updated 25th November 2009