Osage Alphabet

Osage (𐓏𐓘𐓻𐓘𐓻𐓟 𐒻𐓟, Wazhazhe ie) is the language of the Osage Nation, whose capital is Pawhuska, Oklahoma. It belongs to the Dhegiha branch of the Siouan family, with Omaha, Ponca, Kaw and Quapaw as its closest relatives. The alphabet has 36 letters, each with a capital and a small form, written left to right with spaces between words and the ordinary digits and punctuation. The grid above follows the official order, which is also the order of the Unicode block: a nasal vowel sorts right after its oral partner, and each crossbar consonant right after the plain letter it is built on.

The vowel letters are 𐒰 𐓘 a, 𐒱 𐓙 ai, 𐒲 𐓚 aį, 𐒳 𐓛 ə, 𐒷 𐓟 e, 𐒸 𐓠 eį, 𐒻 𐓣 i, 𐓂 𐓪 o, 𐓃 𐓫 oį and 𐓎 𐓶 u. 𐓘 sounds like the a in father and 𐓟 like the e in bet, 𐓪 is a gliding ou, and 𐓶 sits between the u of put and the oo of boot. 𐓛 is the unstressed form of 𐓘, written where the vowel is reduced. Three letters, 𐒲 𐒸 𐓃, are nasal diphthongs with the nasal dot built into the shape; every other nasal vowel takes the separate dot ͘ after the letter, as in 𐓘͘ ą and 𐓣͘ į.

The consonants are 𐒴 𐓜 br, 𐒵 𐓝 ch, 𐒶 𐓞 hch, 𐒹 𐓡 h, 𐒺 𐓢 hy, 𐒼 𐓤 k, 𐒽 𐓥 hk, 𐒾 𐓦 ky, 𐒿 𐓧 l, 𐓀 𐓨 m, 𐓁 𐓩 n, 𐓄 𐓬 p, 𐓅 𐓭 hp, 𐓆 𐓮 s, 𐓇 𐓯 sh, 𐓈 𐓰 t, 𐓉 𐓱 ht, 𐓊 𐓲 ts, 𐓋 𐓳 hts, 𐓌 𐓴 tsh (the ch of church with a puff of air), 𐓍 𐓵 dh (the th of this), 𐓏 𐓷 w, 𐓐 𐓸 x (the rough h of Scottish loch), 𐓑 𐓹 gh (its voiced twin), 𐓒 𐓺 z and 𐓓 𐓻 zh (the s of measure). The five letters with a crossbar, 𐒶 𐒽 𐓅 𐓉 𐓋, write consonants that go back to doubled consonants in the ancestor language: some speakers hold them longer, others begin them with a breath, and one letter covers both. 𐒺 hy and 𐒾 ky stand for sound pairs that the alphabet treats as letters of their own.

How Osage spelling works: the nasal dot, accents and ejectives

Osage adds a small set of marks to its 36 letters, each typed after the letter it sits on. The nasal dot ͘ (Unicode's combining dot above right) turns 𐓘 into 𐓘͘ ą, 𐓛 into 𐓛͘, 𐓣 into 𐓣͘ į and 𐓪 into 𐓪͘ ǫ; 𐓟 and 𐓶 almost never take it. A macron marks a long vowel (𐓘̄ ā), an acute accent marks high pitch (𐓘́ á), and a double acute marks a vowel that is both long and high (𐓘̋). A long or accented vowel sorts as a variant of its base letter, so 𐓘̄ files under 𐓘, while a nasal vowel is a letter in its own right.

Ejective consonants, spoken with a catch in the throat, take the modifier letter apostrophe ʼ: 𐓬ʼ pʼ, 𐓲ʼ tsʼ, 𐓤ʼ kʼ. Strongly aspirated stops are written with two letters, 𐓬𐓸 px or 𐓬𐓯 pš, 𐓤𐓸 kx or 𐓤𐓯 kš, 𐓰𐓸 tx or 𐓴 tsh, the choice following the vowel that comes next. In the fonts made for the Nation the nasal dot sits at cap height on a capital and at x-height on a small letter, and the apostrophe is drawn as a straight stroke at cap height.

Before 2014 the script marked nasal vowels with a caret after the letter, wrote the crossbar consonants as two letters with a raised h, and separated syllables with full stops, so the Language Department's beginner lessons were titled WA.ŽA.ŽE I.E. The 2014 reform, prepared for Unicode with the encoding specialist Michael Everson, introduced the capital and small pairs, replaced those two-letter spellings with the five crossbar letters, retired two ligatures for sts and sk, moved nasality onto the dot, and split the old slanted x into upright 𐓸 x and inverted 𐓹 gh. The proposal's own example of why the split mattered is the word for cedar, which begins with 𐓸, against the word for sloppy, which begins with 𐓹.

Who made the Osage alphabet, and why it looks like English letters

Osage had been written in makeshift Latin spellings for about two centuries, one of the earliest by the Jesuit priest Father Ponziglione around 1851, most of them devised by people who had learned the language as adults. In 2004 the 31st Osage Nation Council started the Osage Language Program and hired Herman Mongrain Lookout, known as Mogri, as its director, with an office in downtown Pawhuska. He first wrote Osage in capital Latin letters, SHOᴺ-KE for dog, but students who knew English far better than Osage kept reading those letters with English sounds. By 2006, working with advanced learners, he had reshaped and fused Latin letters into new ones that English habits could not reach: 𐓯𐓪͘𐓤𐓟 dog, 𐓲𐓣 house, 𐓰𐓘 deer, 𐓤𐓟 turtle. Students and teachers took the new letters up at once, and the Nation has written Osage with them ever since.

The shapes keep a memory of their sources. 𐓘 is an A without its crossbar, 𐓟 a cursive a, 𐓬 fuses P and b, 𐓰 fuses T and D, 𐓤 K and g, 𐓜 b and R; 𐓮 and 𐓺 are the top halves of S and Z; 𐓲 joins 𐓰 and 𐓮; 𐓝 𐓵 𐓯 𐓻 are C, T, S and Z with an h attached; 𐓷 is part of a W. Because every letter has a Latin ancestor, a few look identical to letters you already have: 𐓂 𐓪 and 𐓎 𐓶 are not O o and U u, 𐒰 is not the turned V Λ, 𐓄 is not the Icelandic thorn Þ, and 𐓑 is not the Greek Ψ. Copy the Osage characters from this page, or a spell-checker, a search engine and a screen reader will treat your word as a jumble of Latin.

Between 2012 and 2014 linguists and speakers raised questions about the inventory, and the graphic artists Ryan RedCorn and Jessica Harjo about the typography. A three-day working seminar at the Osage Nation Language Department on 12 to 14 February 2014, with Lookout, the linguist Cameron Pratt, the teachers Janice Carpenter and Stephanie Rapp, both designers, Geoffrey Standing Bear and Michael Everson, settled the five reforms. The Unicode Technical Committee decided in August 2014 to encode Osage as a script of its own rather than as additions to Latin, the Osage Nation Congress adopted the orthography by resolution ONCR 15-25, and Unicode 9.0 added the 72 letters at U+104B0 to U+104FB in June 2016. In 2023 the United States Mint put Maria Tallchief's Osage name, Wa-Xthe-Thoṉba, Two Standards, in the Osage alphabet on her American Women quarter.

Where Osage is written today

The last Osages who grew up with the language as their first died in the 2000s; everyone who speaks it now learned it, most of them through the Language Department's classes for children, beginners and advanced students and its online course. Since 2015 the Nation's immersion school in Pawhuska, Daposka Ahnkodapi, Our School, has taught young children in Osage, with their parents enrolled in evening classes. Teaching materials, signs, the Nation's website and its social media posts use the alphabet, and the Department planned a standard dictionary in it once Unicode fonts arrived; Carolyn Quintero's Osage Dictionary (2009), in a Latin transcription, remains the main printed reference.

The alphabet is a national achievement rather than a scholar's transcription: it was designed by an Osage language teacher for Osage learners, refined by Osage teachers and designers, and adopted by the Osage Nation's own legislature. Our Cherokee Syllabary page tells the story of the other script of eastern Oklahoma; the Letter Emoji & Alphabet Symbols collection has the Latin look-alikes that Osage set out to escape.

How to type Osage and which fonts show it

The Osage block has been in Unicode since version 9.0 (June 2016), so the letters paste into any modern app; if you see boxes, the font is missing, not the text. Windows 10 and 11 ship Osage in the Gadugi font. Google's free Noto Sans Osage is the font the Osage Nation uses on its own website and the one most Osage text is set in; install it on a Mac, on Linux or on an older Windows. The type foundry Typotheque has since drawn November Osage and Lava Osage, the first with an italic, for the Nation's publications.

To type, the Osage Nation Language Department released a free Osage keyboard and font in 2018 for Windows, macOS and iOS, plus a Chrome extension; on an iPhone or iPad the Osage Keyboard app from the App Store installs both. The Keyman Osage keyboard, updated for the current orthography in December 2023, covers Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. Without a keyboard, copy from the grid above, or in Microsoft Word type the code and press Alt+X: 104B0 Alt+X gives 𐒰 and 104D8 gives 𐓘. The marks go after the letter: 𐓘 followed by ͘ gives 𐓘͘, and 𐓘 followed by ́ gives 𐓘́.