Tlingit alphabet

The Tlingit language has been recorded in a number of orthographies over the two hundred years since European contact. The first transcriptions of Tlingit were done by Russian Orthodox ministers, hence they were in the Cyrillic script. A hiatus in writing Tlingit occurred subsequent to the purchase of Alaska by the United States due to the policies implemented by Presbyterian reverend and territorial educational commissioner Sheldon Jackson, who believed that the use of indigenous languages should be suppressed in favor of English. American and German anthropologists began recording Tlingit in various linguistic transcriptions from the 1890s onward, and there exists a small body of literature and a large amount of vocabulary recorded in these transcriptions. With the work of two linguists from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Gillian Story and Constance Naish, the first “complete” orthography for Tlingit began to spread in the 1960s. This orthography, now somewhat modified by native hands, is the most common orthography in use today. In the 1980s Jeff Leer and the Yukon Native Language Center developed another orthography for writing Interior Tlingit. Since the spread of e-mail among the Tlingit population a new orthography has developed by consensus, based on the Naish-Story orthography but adapted to the restrictions of plain text encodings such as ISO 8859-1.

An example of the Cyrillic Tlingit alphabet can be found in the text Indication of the Pathway into the Kingdom of Heaven (Russian Указаніе пути въ Царствіе Небесное, Tlingit-Cyrillic Ка-вак-шіи ев-у-ту-ци-ни-и дте Тики Ан-ка-у хан-те), written by the priest John Veniaminov in 1901. This orthography does not have a one-to-one correspondence with Tlingit phonemes nor does it record tone, but a Tlingit speaker familiar with the Cyrillic script can puzzle out the proper pronunciations without too much difficulty.

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