Monthly Archives: March 2015

Can Canadian Chipewian Speakers Use /ʔ/ ?

The Canadian CBC has an interesting story of a Canadian mother of Chipewian heritage not being able to use a glottal stop character ʔ in her daughter’s name.

Rather than double posting, I thought I would point you to my Unicode blog post.

Postscript: March 27

On a recent realia hunt for Canadian bilingual signs, I found this sign in British Columbia warning visitors about the local snake danger. The top part of the sign reads ḱəḱaʔlistax x̌əx̌uləxʷ. Apparently there is some support for not only “ʔ”, but also “ə”, superscript “ʷ” and a multitude of diacritics. Impressive. Photographer Heather Joan notes that the top language is the Salish language Nsyilxcen.

realia – images, video or objects that show authentic language use.