Land acknowledgments honour the history and presence of Indigenous peoples on the lands where we live and work, fostering respect and reconciliation. However, presenting them typographically can be challenging due to limited language support in many typefaces.
This article explores how to reflect the true significance of land acknowledgments with your typography by choosing fonts with proper language support and ensuring land acknowledgments are set with care and respect.
Land acknowledgments are a peaceful way of bringing awareness and recognition to the history of the lands on which we live and operate our businesses and organizations. They acknowledge the role of colonialism and the ongoing relationship between the land and people. As indigenous issues and reconciliation have become more mainstream topics, more people and organizations have been incorporating land acknowledgements into their events, signage, websites, and publications.
From a typographic perspective, setting land acknowledgements is not as easy as it seems, mainly because of a lack of language support in most fonts. If we are using land acknowledgements as a sign of respect then we need to make sure that the languages are treated with care and respect typographically as well.
If you have chosen a typeface outside of Times New Roman or Arial, chances are that it may not support the indigenous languages in your land acknowledgment. The first step is to find a font that has the necessary language support. You’ll know if your font is missing characters if you see something like this:
This means that the typeface does not have those characters and it will instead display a “not defined” character (sometimes also referred to as tofu). Sometimes though, to keep the text readable, instead of using a tofu character, the software will use a fallback font to display the missing characters. This keeps the text readable but creates visual inconsistencies that can give the impression that you didn’t put in the effort to set the language properly.
Sometimes the fallback font will be very obviously wrong like the above example but sometimes it is more subtle so you need to look carefully:
First, figure out if the language is Latin-based or if it has its own script. Latin-based means that the language is written in the Latin script using a base Latin alphabet, often with some accents or characters found in other alphabets like IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and sometimes other scripts like Greek. If the language is Latin-based, Times New Roman and Arial are always available options but they are not very exciting and may not pair well with the other typefaces you are using. An easy way to search for more options is to go to Google fonts (or any other font library) and input the word you are looking for in the preview area, like xʷməθkʷəy̓əm for example. You’ll be able to quickly narrow down your options.
I have been adding Latin-based indigenous languages to my character set over the last few years and Stornoway and Tofino currently both support Nisg̱a’a, Nuučaan̓uɫ, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səlilwətaɬ, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm. If you are looking for those languages, try out my typefaces. If you want me to add a language for you, get in touch—I’m happy to keep adding more!
If the language is in another script (not latin-based) such as Canadian Syllabics or the Cherokee syllabary, you’ll have to do some research to find typefaces that support it.
You can certainly try! Reach out to the font’s designer and see if they are willing to add the support. If they don’t have the time, see if you can get permission for someone else to add it and get in touch with me, I’m happy to expand language support of other typefaces with permission from the original type designer.
Once you have a typeface that supports the language, there are some design considerations for setting the land acknowledgment.
You may want to try to get a close match to the fonts you are using elsewhere in your design to keep your typography consistent. If you can find a variable font with similar letter shapes, you will be able to fine tune the weight so it matches more with your other fonts.
You can also use layout or a change in style (like making it italic) to make the change in font less noticeable or jarring to the viewer. Also note that it is best to set the entire paragraph in the alternative font, if you just set the language names in the alternate font it’s visually the same as when single letterforms are swapped, which is exactly what we are trying to avoid by selecting a font with appropriate character support.
If you haven’t made language support a priority in your type choice for a web project, you may not want to load an entire extra font for one paragraph. It may be better to fallback the entire paragraph to Times New Roman or Arial if web performance will be impacted.
Overall, it only takes a little effort to ensure that indigenous languages are type-set with care and respect. This is often the first way that someone outside of indigenous culture will encounter and interact with indigenous languages. The majority of these languages are endangered and language revitalization efforts are underway to preserve and pass down these languages to the next generations. As language revitalization continues and more typefaces grow their character sets, hopefully workarounds in typesetting indigenous languages will be needed less often.