Lakota/Keyboard

Existing Resources

• remember to add image

Lakota Language Consortium desktop software

• This is a software bundle for Windows and OS which includes a keyboard layout and fonts bundle

Lakota Language Consortium Mobile Software

• This is a mobile app for iOS
• Poorly reviewed

LLC Mobile Software

• This is a mobile app for Android
• Mixed reviews

Sample of Existing Keyboard

• from Lakota Language Consortium

Our Keyboard Layout Design

Make sure to add a link to your GitHub repository -JNW

~
`

◌̃

%
!

 

@
?

#
/

á
A

é

í

ó

ú

^
(

*
)

_
-

+
=

       

Ǧ
ǧ

 

W
w

E
e

Š
š

T
t

Y
y

U
u

I
i

O
o

P
p

{
[

}
]

|
\

        

A
a

S
s

D
d

Ŋ
ŋ

G
g

H
h

Ȟ
ȟ

K
k

L
l

:
;

"
'

◌̈
◌́

           

Z
z

Ž
ž

Č
č

V
v

B
b

N
n

M
m

<
,

>
.

Add stress to vowel

How does the "add stress" part work? Is it a deadkey, combining diacritic, or something else? -JNW

I'm curious about the apostrophe—is it an alphabetic character? See Which apostrophe character should I use. -JNW

Justification

We modelled our keyboard layout off the Lakota Learning Consortium's keyboard (shown above) and incorporated feedback from an App Store review of it as well as our observations of the use of characters and punctuation within our corpus. We maintained the LLC keyboard's layout of alphabetic characters, given that we know most Lakota speakers are bilingual and fluent in English and we liked that it was close to the layout of the American English keyboard while also replacing unnecessary characters with those used in the Lakota orthography. The LLC keyboard included a deadkey which adds stress to vowels, and we opted to keep that as well, and moved the characters "?" and "/", which were originally where the deadkey is, to the top numeric row. We also changed the positioning of the numeric characters based on use of punctuation and assumption of a numpad. The LLC keyboard excluded the exclamation mark as well as the ampersand, along with a few other characters we thought would be useful, so we replaced the numbers 1, 2, 3, 9 and 0 with punctuation instead - the retention of only five numbers seemed arbitrary, at any rate. We chose lowercase punctuation marks based on frequency of use, and made sure to include all the punctuation marks one would need to use when typing both formally and informally.