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Things to know about Denesuline

Denesuline is a Native American/First Nations language spoken by the Denesuline peoples. Today, Denesuline speakers are mostly found in Canada, primarily in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories. Denesuline is considered a member of the Northern Athabaskan language branch of the Na-Dene language family.

Typing Denesuline Characters

Denesuline is written using a variation of the Latin alphabet that includes several characters with diacritic marks.

There are two ways to type the special characters used in transliterated Denesuline:

The simplest method is to use the character suggestions. To do so, type the base character for the letter you want, such as a for á, then select the special character from the set of characters which appears. For ł and Ł, the base character is L. For ʔ, the base character is ?.

The other method is to use the virtual keyboard with the layout set to Denesuline. (If necessary, you can change the layout by clicking Settings and selecting an option in the Keyboard Language menu.)

Locate the character you want on the virtual keyboard, then click on it or press the corresponding key on your physical keyboard. Capital letters and certain punctuation marks are available by holding down the Shift key.

See Typing Accents and Special Characters for details on both typing methods.


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