Wôpanâak/Keyboard
Contents
Keyboard Layouts
Wôpanâak with English
This layout might be useful for someone typing purely in Wôpanâak, although it retains English functionality. Three Wôpanâak characters that do not appear in English (ô, â, and ȣ) replace three characters not used in Wôpanâak (o, f, and j, respectively). The English characters can be obtained using the right alt key with the respective keys.
English with Wôpnanâak
This keyboard layout maintains the English keyboard layout to a greater degree, which might be useful for someone switching between the two languages but familiar with the English layout. Instead of replacing English characters with Wôpanâak ones, the Wôpanâak characters are obtained using the alt key with three English letters (o becomes ô, a becomes â, and u becomes ȣ). Additionally, the combination shift+6 is a deadkey that can apply a circumflex to following letter (the circumflex on its own can be obtained with alt+6).
Justifications
I used the US English keyboard layout as a basis for both layouts. The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project is located in Massachusetts, and its students are members of various Wampanoag communities in the state. Therefore, most or all of them are likely native speakers of US English, and are probably accustomed to the standard US keyboard layout.
The orthography used by Jessie Little Doe Baird in her thesis An Introduction to Wampanoag Grammar makes use of only three characters that do not appear in English: â, ô, and ȣ. While some online Wôpanâak resources rendered ȣ with the numeral 8, I found that the ȣ ligature is used in the orthographies of other Algonquian languages to represent similar sounds[1], and I was able to find keyboard layouts for some of them which used the ligature[2]. I also used separate characters for ô and â, instead of using combining diacritical marks, because with only the two in the language it seemed easier to type.
Because there are not many characters that do not appear in English, and several English characters that do not appear in Wôpanâak, I decided that it would probably be best to remove the inconvenience of having to use multiple keys for one letter when typing solely in Wôpanâak. I replaced three characters which did not appear in Wôpanâak with the three that did. I replaced o with ô on the basis of visual similarity, and replaced f with â and j with ȣ because the keys were central and easy to use, and because the letters f and j are not overwhelmingly common in English.
Since all Wôpanâak speakers and students are also English speakers, however, and there might be contexts in which they would want to switch between the two languages, I thought it would be helpful to have a layout that did not alter the English keyboard as much. For this layout, I added the Wôpanâak characters to the English keys as third cases. I put â on the a key and ô on the o key on the basis of visual similarity, and ȣ on the u key because the Wôpanâak ȣ produces a similar sound to the English u.
