Tribal languages, at your fingertips

Salish, Kootenai keyboards coming to a school near you

Students across the reservation will have the languages of the Salish and Kootenai tribes right at their finger tips.

Modified keyboards featuring unique characters will soon be available in area schools and will enable students to type in traditional Salish and Kootenai languages — the result of hard work by a former SKC technology director.

Something that was once blamed for taking a toll on tribal languages and customs could actually help preserve the native tongue.

"When modern technology first arrived here, it started taking our language and culture away from us," said Tony Incashola, director of the Salish Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee, in a prepared statement. "But now we're learning how to take that same technology and turn it around, using it to teach our children our language and culture."

Using the newest creation of software, former Salish Kootenai College technology director Jim Ereaux has created two new fonts that will work on both PC and Mac platforms.

To have fonts that work on both Mac and PC was critical, he explained. While most of the world uses PCs, Macintosh computers are still used in many educational settings, and Ereaux said the program had to work with both operating systems to be effective.

"We needed to bring standardization to it," he said.

The keyboards are like any other, he explained, only the English letters have been replaced with either Salish characters or Kootenai characters. The Salish language has more characters than the English language so it doesn't quite fit on the standard English keyboard. The solution? Use the numerical buttons on top and replace them with Salish characters, Ereaux said.

Also, with the simple tap of the caps lock button, people can switch between writing in a native language or English. Plus, the keys are removable, allowing you to place more commonly used characters within comfortable reach of your fingers, allowing for more efficient typing.

But what really allows for quicker typing speed is the OpenType technology. Many languages use require several glyphs to compose one character. Rather than type two or three glyphs per character, one key stroke is all it will take for the glyphs to be assembled automatically, he explained. (However, if you're accustomed to punching each glyph, you will still have that option.)

Because the project largely aims to educate students in Salish and Kootenai Languages, the new fonts also allow for use of teaching programs like crossword puzzles and software that creates teacher user plans.

Native language fonts are nothing new, he explained, but what makes this program unique is that it can spellcheck documents written in both tribal languages. It also has a find /replace feature, which is also a new option for programs of this kind.

The new fonts were created using two new technologies called Unicode and OpenType. Unicode is the global standard for multi-language word processing and houses thousands of languages and is capable of supporting over one million possible characters.

The Salish and Kootenai Tribes have had access to a variety of computer fonts and applications in the past to produce publications and historical documents, but these programs are antiquated and becoming more and more obsolete as computer technology advances, Ereaux explained.

The Salish and Kootenai Culture Committees tapped Ereaux to help develop the new software last year. Since then, he estimates he has put in about 400 hours on the project. With the coordination of Culture Committees, several linguists and the typographic community on the Internet, the project was underway. Tony Incashola, Shirley Trahan and Thompson Smith provided guidance from the Salish Culture Committee while Vernon Finley and Dorothy Berney provided guidance from the Kootenai Culture Committee.

In April 2006, a grant was written through Salish Kootenai College, from both Blackfoot Telephone Cooperative and the Lower Flathead Valley Community Foundation to support the creation of customized keyboards for both languages. Both organizations donated nearly $6,000 to the project.

The idea behind this new word processor is that it will be compatible with more advanced systems. The minimum operating requirements are Windows XP and higher on the PC and OS 10.4 on the Macintosh.

"We knew there was this globalization with other processors and that is the direction we wanted to head," he said.