Lakota/Final Presentation

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Here, we aim to answer the question: how can we adapt Latinated keyboards for Suggested Lakota Orthography? We will do so by developing a number of keyboard resources for Lakota across different operating systems, and expanding on our work on a Lakota keyboard here

Background

Orthography

  • While there are several existing orthographies of Lakota, we found the most popular to be Suggested Lakota Orthography (SLO)
  • This is the most widely used both virtually and across textbooks and language learning resources
  • The alphabet in this orthography is as follows:
    • A Á B C Č D E É G Ǧ H Ȟ I Í K L M N Ŋ O Ó P S Š T U Ú V W Y Z Ž
    • a á b c č d e é g ǧ h ȟ i í k l m n ŋ o ó p s š t u ú v w y z ž


Demand

  • There has been an increased move to digital access and digitisation across Lakota communities
  • Lakota language learning methods and classes have gone virtual and expanded through the pandemic
  • Language learners have also turned to online forums on Facebookto practice and communicate in Lakota
  • This necessitates a working and accessible Lakota keyboard

Design

Inspiration

  • We found an existing keyboard developed by the Lakota Language Consortium (LLC) here

Our Layout

GitHub repository of keyboard design

~
`
◌̃
%
!

@
?

#
/

Á
á

É
é

Í
í

Ó
ó

Ú
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

Rationale

  • This design is adapted from the LLC's above keyboard design
  • We incorporated feedback from a negative App Store review
  • We also made changes based on our observations from the use and frequency of certain 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, and included an apostrophe as an alphabetic character.

Adaptations

  • We adapted the original keyboard layout design to be usable across Windows and OSX operating systems
  • We believe this will make the layouts more accessible to a wider range of individuals

Challenges

Design

Coding

Cultural Considerations

Conclusion