Yupik (Yup'ik/Юпик)

The Yupik languages belong to the Yupik branch of the Eskimo language family. They are spoken by about 11,800 people in Alaska and Siberia. Yupik is written with the Latin alphabet in Alaska and with the Cyrillic alphabet in Siberia.

At the beginning of the 19th century missionaries and their Yupik-speaking assitants devised a method of writing Yupik with the Latin alphabet. This alphabet was named after the Reverend John Hinz, one of the missionaries, and was used to publish translations of the Bible and other religious texts in Yupik. In Siberia a method of writing Yupik with the Cyrillic languages was developed by scholars, but those Yupik who can write tend to write in Russian.

In the 1960s a group of scholars and native Yupik speakers came together at the University of Alaska to develop a new orthography for Yupik. One of their goals was to devise an orthography that could be input on an English keyboard, without accent marks or extra letters. They also wanted to represent the individual sounds of the language with separate letters.

Latin alphabet for Yupik

Cyrillic alphabet for Yupik

The blue letter is only used to write Russian loanwords.

Links

Information about the Yupik language and people
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ea210/aleut.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yupik_language

Yup'ik language materials
http://www.alaskool.org/language/indexing/yupindex.htm

Alaskan Orthodox texts (Aleut, Alutiiq, Tlingit, Yup'ik). An ongoing project offering Alaskan Orthodox texts on-line in their original languages and alphabets
http://www.asna.ca/alaska/

Alaskan Native Heritage Center
http://www.alaskanative.net

Aleut, Greenlandic, Inuktitut, Yupik

Other languages written with the Cyrillic alphabet