Western Cree syllabics
| Western Cree syllabics |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Type | |
| Languages | Plains Cree, Woods Cree, western dialects of Swampy Cree |
|
Time period
|
1840s-present |
|
Parent systems
|
|
|
Child systems
|
Eastern Cree, Blackfoot, Slavey, Dogrib, Beaver, Sayisi (Chipewyan), Carrier |
| Direction | Left-to-right |
| ISO 15924 | Cans, 440 |
|
Unicode alias
|
Canadian Aboriginal |
| Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, U+1400–167F (chart) | |
Western Cree syllabics are a variant of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics used to write Plains Cree, Woods Cree and the western dialects of Swampy Cree. It is used for all Cree dialects west of approximately the Manitoba–Ontario border in Canada, as opposed to Eastern Cree syllabics. It is also occasionally used by a few Cree speakers in the United States.
Cree syllabics uses different glyphs to indicate consonants, and changes the orientation of these glyphs to indicate the vowel that follows it. The basic principles of Canadian syllabic writing are outlined in the article for Canadian Aboriginal syllabics.
Western syllabics use only those characters needed to write the phonemes of the western dialects. In this article, Cree words and sounds will transcribed using the Standard Roman Orthography used to teach Plains Cree.
There are four basic vowels in Plains and Swampy Cree: a, i, e and o. The a, i and o sounds also have long versions: â, î and ô. The vowel e is always long and is written as ê. In Woods Cree, ê has merged with î, so only three basic vowels are used in that dialect. Woods Cree also has the phoneme th /ð/ (the th from the English word that). For more on Cree dialects see the article on the Cree language.
Standard Roman Orthography consonants sound for the most part like their English equivalents, except that they are never aspirated. (/p/ sounds like the "p" in "spot", not "pea".) The letter c sounds like the "ts" in "bits". Long vowels can be written either with a macron or a circumflex.
Notes:
Note that the th-series closely resembles the y-series characters. The th phoneme in Woods Cree appears where a y is found in Plains or an n in Swampy Cree. Recognising the relationship between the th and y sounds, Cree writers use a modification of the y-series.
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