Between 1891 and 1894 a newspaper was published in syllabics at Naka'zdli (Fort Saint James) six times a year. Here is the first page of the first issue, dated October 1891.

One of the longest texts in syllabics by a Dakelh person is seven page submission from Nak'az̲dli to the McKenna-McBride Commission in 1915. Here is the first page. (Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to read.)

There are several dozen gravestones with inscriptions in syllabics. Here is the grave of Agatha John Thomas from the Saik'uz graveyard. Clicking on a character will cause the equivalent in the Carrier Linguistic Committee writing system to appear at the bottom of the page.

The Dakelh portion of the inscription reads

This means: "Agatha's grave. Pray for her."

Here is the grave of a woman named Belzeni (from French Virginie) from the Nak'azdli graveyard. Clicking on a character will cause the equivalent in the Carrier Linguistic Committee writing system to appear at the bottom of the page.

The inscription reads:

This means: "Virginia died November 9, 1918."

This gravestone illustrates the way in which Dakelh people introduced devices for representing sounds not native to Dakelh. The system as introduced by Father Morice provided only for sounds native to Dakelh. When Dakelh people borrowed words from English and French, they sometimes kept unfamiliar sounds such as /r/ and /v/. The use of the v-like symbol that represents /k'/ followed by a /b/-series symbol (here /be/) to represent /v/ is one such innovation. The little cross that represents the /r/ of "November" is another of these innovations.

[Note: we have given the text of these inscriptions as it would now be correctly written. In fact, these inscriptions, like most inscriptions on gravestones, contain errors and omissions. For example, in Virginia's gravestone the letter that should represent /i/ is missing the triangle that should surround the dot.This is partly due to spelling conventions that we cannot go into here and partly due to the fact that most of the gravestones were ordered from the Hudson's Bay Company and were carved in Victoria by people who were merely copying an inscription that they did not understand in a writing system with which they were not at all familiar.]

One of the most widely read publications in the syllabics was the Roman Catholic prayerbook. Many people learned to read Dakelh from this book. Here is a page from the 1933 edition. At the top of the page are the fifth through tenth of the Ten Commandments. The Fifth Commandment reads ne-so-lh-ghe-lh ju-ni-h ``do not kill people''.

Syllabics are not very widely used anymore, but there has been a resurgence in interest. Until he passed away in 2004 Nak'azdli elder Nick Prince used to teach classes on syllabics from time to time. In many places they are considered appropriate for formal purposes even though only a few people can read them. For example, when a plaque was put up in the Ulkatcho Learning Centre in Anahim Lake in 1993 in honour of the late Chief Jimmy Stillas, the text was written in four languages: Ulkatcho dialect Dakelh, Nuxalk, Chilcotin, and English, with the Dakelh written both in the Carrier Linguistic Committee writing system and in syllabics. Here is a photograph of the plaque just before it was put up.

A textbook of the syllabics is available: Introduction to the Carrier Syllabics. You can download the pdf here

Several Unicode fonts are available that include the Carrier syllabics as part of the larger Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics set. We recommend the fonts created by LanguageGeek. The font itself is oskidakelh.zip. Here are instructions on how to install fonts.

The converter at http://www.translitteration.com/transliteration/en/carrier/canadian-aboriginal-syllabics/ is incorrect and should not be used. Try this transliterator instead.

LanguageGeek also has available keyboard maps for typing in syllabics. One allows you to type in the Carrier Linguistic Committee system and converts on the fly to dulkw'ahke. The other assigns dulkw'ahke characters to single keys. These keyboards work on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh OS X systems and allow you to type in syllabics in programs such as Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Writer.

A simple text editor that allows dulkw'ahke to be entered by typing in the Carrier Linguistic Committee writing system is the Yudit Unicode text editor, downloadable at no cost from http://www.yudit.org/. Yudit runs on UNIX systems, including GNU/Linux, and Microsoft Windows. Further information on using Yudit to write in syllabics is available here..

A detailed explanation of the syllabics aimed at linguists is given in the paper The Carrier Syllabics. To download a copy, go to the download page.

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