Haida Language - Orthography

Orthography

Several orthographies have been devised for writing Haida. The first alphabet was devised by the Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC) for Kaigani Haida in 1972, based on Tlingit orthographic conventions, and is still in use. The linguist John Enrico created another orthography for Skidegate and Masset Haida which introduced ⟨7⟩ and ⟨@⟩ as letters and did away with the distinction between upper and lower case, and this system is popular in Canada. Robert Bringhurst, for his publications on Haida literature, created an orthography without punctuation or numerals, and few apostrophes; and in 2008 the Skidegate Haida Immersion Program (SHIP) created another, which is the usual orthography used in Skidegate. Other systems have been used by isolated linguists.

Haida consonants are represented as follows. Where conventions differ, their order is Enrico Masset, Enrico Skidegate, ANLC, SHIP, Bringhurst. In the case of glottalized consonants, the second is Bringhurst's orthography:

In ANLC orthography ⟨ch⟩ is used for ⟨ts⟩ in syllable-initial position, and a hyphen is used to distinguish consonant clusters from digraphs (e.g. kwáan-gang contains the sequence /n/ followed by /g/ rather than the consonant /ŋ/). Bringhurst uses a raised dot for the same, kwáan·gang. The Enrico orthography uses ⟨l⟩ (or ⟨ll⟩ when long) for the syllabic lateral in Skidegate Haida, e.g. tl'l. Enrico uses a period ⟨.⟩ for an "unlinked consonant slot." ⟨r x⟩ are used for /ɢ̥ χ/ in Enrico's Skidegate orthography since they generally correspond to /ʡ͡ʜ ʜ/ in the other dialects.

The following are how Haida vowels are written:

Enrico (2003) uses ⟨@⟩ for some instances of /a/ based on morphophonemics. Alaskan Haida also has a diphthong written ⟨ei⟩. Enrico & Stuart (1996) use ⟨ï ë ä⟩ for the vowels /ɯ ɜ æ/ that occur in nonsense syllables in songs.