Halq'eméylem Font Downloads

Writing words in Aboriginal languages on the computer can be trying. Standard character sets and fonts do not generally come with a sufficient number of symbols to express all the sounds made in these languages. This problem is compounded by the number of different writing systems that get developed over the years for a single language, each of which has its own unique set of symbols.

This has particularly been a problem in my work with Halq'eméylem, a Salishan language spoken by First Naitons people living in the Fraser Valley. Working with graphic designer Matt Heximer (formerly of Ion Design, Vancouver) and generously funded by the Finance Department of the Stó:lo Nation, I have designed a set of True-Type fonts which have all the characters necessary to express words written in the practical orthography (developed by the Coqualeetza Cultural Education and Training Centre), the International Phonetic Alphabet, the PPS system developed by Oliver Wells, and the different systems used in publications by Franz Boas, Charles Hill-Tout, Wilson Duff and Marion Smith.

When I started to work on Vancouver Island, I found that the communities used a unique orthography to write Hul'q'umi'num'.  I developed with Rod McFarland (a programmer and designer) a font based on the very attractive Garamond set, which has the Cowichan Orthography, the IPA characters needed in most Salishan languages, the characters needed for Sencothen, as well as most of the historic writing systems mentioned above.  Because there were so many unique characters, we designed this font as a Unicode set.  It works well in an MS Office environment, but not in ArcView 3.2 or similar software that does not support Unicode, nor any version of WordPerfect, including v.11, which relies on different codepage values.

Download all five font files to have serif and sans-serif typefaces in regular, bold and italic orientations.