What's More Canadian Than Cree?
I was pointed to this great resource on Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin) links but it still doesn't have much information about presenting this language on the web.
Since hearing the story about the creation of Cree & Inuit syllabics, I've been interested in how colonization introduced written language to an oral culture. Since working on several Arabic/Hebrew/Farsi sites over the years, I've been curious as to how this applies to the web. Being a unilingual person, I can't do more than look at the characters in any of these languages and I certainly have no education in linguistics. However, I find the challenge of implementing aboriginal languages on the Internet to be quite a fascinating one.
Cree is the most widely spoken native language in Canada and it's a people that span much of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and the Northwest Territories. However, I was surprised to see how little content I could find on the Web that was written in Cree. Much of what was available was presented either as images or through Flash, neither of which can be copied, easily searched and certainly would be inaccessible to assistive technologies. The lack of examples to learn from certainly made this exploration more difficult.
