Yakama Ichishkíin-English Keyboard

A keyboard that types in both Yakama Ichishkíin and English characters.

Learning or speaking Ichishkíin? Carry your learning and usage over to your Android phones and tablets! This is a keyboard that allows for the typing of both Yakama Ichishkíin characters and English characters, without having to switch applications.

Yakama Ichishkíin orthography has several characters that do not exist in English, such as the ḵ, x̱, ł, and ɨ, as well as accented vowels, like á, í, ɨ́, and ú. It also has several consonants that are multiple-characters as one letter, such as aa, kw, x̱w, ts’, and sh. This keyboard allows for the typing of all 39 Ichishkíin alphabet letters.

Accented vowels are accessible by double tapping all vowels (including long versions). Hard versions of soft consonants are accessible by double tapping the consonant, instead of simply adding the glottal stop after the soft consonant to transform it.

It also allows for more common English input and numeric/symbol input, through switching to alternative keyboard setups within the app.

This app is still in development, but will be able to accomplish all basic needs of most language-learner phone users. We hope to make this language more accessible to more populations through phone and consequent increased internet usage!

After this application is finalized, then we will start working on both the Warm Springs and Umatilla dialect keyboards. This code is also highly customizable, so if your language community is interested in its own Android keyboard, please contact us and we can figure it out together!