✍️Duployan — the shorthand that became a community orthography

Duployan shorthand began as a French stenographic system and ended up as something far more unusual: a script that First Nations communities in British Columbia adopted, taught each other, and used to read and write their own languages for three decades. Most shorthands stay shorthand — a private speed-writing tool that dies with the stenographer. Duployan is the one that crossed over into everyday literacy, and that crossing is the reason it is on this page rather than in a history of office technology.¹²

Where it came from

Father Émile Duployé devised the system in 1860 for writing French, publishing it in 1868.¹ It is classified as a *geometric* shorthand: its letterforms are built from straight lines and segments of circles rather than the slanted ellipses of script-like systems such as Gregg. It is also fully *alphabetic* — consonants and vowels carry equal weight, unlike systems that treat vowels as optional diacritics. It runs left to right, and most letters join to their neighbours, so a whole word, sometimes several words, can be written without lifting the pen.¹

Adaptations followed quickly, each aimed at a different language or market: Helen Pernin's Universal Phonography (1877), the Sloan-Duployan Modern Shorthand of J. M. Sloan (1883), Ellis (1888), Denis Perrault's English shorthand, and — the one that matters most here — Father Jean-Marie-Raphaël Le Jeune's Chinook writing (1891).¹ A Romanian stenography was developed as late as the 1980s by Margaretta Sfințescu.¹

How the system works

Duployan divides its inventory into two consonant families and two vowel families. The logic is geometric throughout: a letter's identity comes from its *shape*, its *size*, and its *stroke direction*, and — crucially for consonants — none of those change based on what sits next to it.¹

Consonants: lines and arcs

• **Line consonants** come in five orientations — vertical, horizontal, left-to-right falling, left-to-right rising, and right-to-left falling — and three lengths: short, long, and extended. Some variants add dots beside the middle of the line.
• **Arc consonants** come as half circles or quarter circles. Half-circle arcs have four orientations (left, right, top, bottom) and two lengths; their variants add dots inside or outside the bowl, or a dash across the middle. Quarter arcs occupy the four quadrants of a circle and are written both upwards and downwards.

Vowels: circles and orienting shapes

Vowels behave completely differently from consonants, and this is the part that trips up anyone approaching Duployan from an alphabetic background. A vowel has a general shape and size, but **its orientation and exact appearance are dictated by the letters around it**.¹

• **Circle vowels** are written as a loop that begins tangent to the preceding letter, travels around, and ends at the tangent point of the following letter — the two neighbouring strokes crossing to close the circle. Where space is tight the loop can shrink to as little as a semicircle.
• **Orienting vowels** rotate to meet the incoming angle of the preceding letter, then mirror along that letter's axis so the following letter does not cross them. They come in two varieties depending on which way they lean when the neighbours permit a choice.
• **Nasal vowels** are treated as a special case of the orienting vowels — except in Chinook writing, where they can appear as diacritics instead.

Abbreviation machinery

Most Duployan shorthands carry a layer of speed-writing devices on top of the alphabet: small unattached marks, crossing and touching strokes standing for common prefixes and suffixes, single letters used as whole words, and — in some systems — two or more letters overlapped to form a word sign. French Duployan uses an extensive set of these, and like most European shorthands it simply omits vowels a fluent reader can supply.¹ Sloan-Duployan does something no other member of the family does: it uses a *thick* stroke to add an "R" sound to a letter. Contrastive thick and thin strokes are common in Pitman, where weight marks voicing — but in Sloan it means something else entirely.¹

Chinuk pipa: the adaptation that became an orthography

In June 1890, Oblate missionaries meeting at New Westminster discussed a practical problem: Carrier syllabics, highly successful further north, suited the languages it was built for but not the range of languages spoken across British Columbia. Father J. D. Chiappini proposed shorthand instead, on the grounds that one system could serve European and Indigenous languages alike.²

Father Jean-Marie-Raphaël Le Jeune took the idea back to the Kamloops area that August and started teaching. It went nowhere until he reached Coldwater, near Merritt, where a man named **Charlie Alexis Mayous** took it up seriously. Le Jeune left him a notebook of alphabet lessons and common prayers and carried on his circuit. When he returned that December he found Mayous had learned the entire system, worked out and memorised the prayers, and could read French and English as readily as his own language — and had started teaching others.²

What happened next is the genuinely remarkable part, and it was driven by Indigenous teachers rather than by the missionary. Mayous travelled to Douglas Lake and taught there; the community was so eager that they sharpened Le Jeune's pencils to keep him writing lesson books without pause. Douglas Lake wanted to keep Mayous; Coldwater would not release him. By Easter, Le Jeune returned to Coldwater to find Mayous had taught everyone, and that the community could read their prayers in Nlaka'pamuxtsin.² After a large gathering at Kamloops in July 1891, the Secwépemc — impressed by what the Nlaka'pamux could do — set out to learn it themselves, and within two months could read most things written in Chinook Jargon or Secwepemctsín.²

The bottleneck was reproduction. Le Jeune tried a hectograph in February 1891, then ordered an Edison mimeograph in March. On **25 May 1891** he published the first issue of the *Kamloops Wawa* — "Talk of Kamloops" — and promptly shut it down for want of subscribers. He resumed on 2 February 1892 with a print run of 25, which grew through 100, 150, 200 and 250 to as many as 300 copies per issue by year's end.² Publication continued into the 1900s.²

The Kamloops Wawa was written almost entirely in Duployan — not as a transcription of a language already written another way, but as that language's working script.

Content was mostly community news, liturgical translation and hymns, in the local variety of Chinook Jargon, with passages in Nlaka'pamuxtsin, Secwepemctsín, St'át'imcets and other languages. Some runs carried Chinook Jargon translations of Latin classics, including the Seven Kings of Rome. In 1893 Monsignor Durieu's Chinook Jargon Old Testament was distributed as a sixteen-page monthly supplement.²

Why Chinook writing is structurally different

Chinuk pipa is not simply French Duployan with new sound values. Because it was built for ordinary literacy rather than for speed, it drops the shorthand machinery and gains precision:¹

• **No affix marks and no word signs** — the abbreviation layer that defines French Duployan is absent.
• **Vowels are always written**, even when a fluent speaker could predict them. Every other Duployan system omits them.
• **W-vowels** are used as a distinct series.
• Words are split into roughly **syllabic units**, and it contains the only **non-joining consonant characters** anywhere in the Duployan family.

In other words, the thing that made it teachable — phonological rigour, no memorised abbreviations, no omitted vowels — is precisely what makes it a poor stenography and a serviceable orthography. That trade is the whole story of this script.

The family, at a glance

Duployan in Unicode

All the Duployan shorthands — French Duployan, Chinook writing, Pernin, Perrault, Sloan-Duployan and Romanian stenography — were encoded as a **single script** in Unicode 7.0, released June 2014.¹³ Its ISO 15924 code is `Dupl` (755). Two blocks are involved:

The format controls exist because Duployan encodes *layout* that other scripts handle with plain sequencing. U+1BCA0 SHORTHAND FORMAT LETTER OVERLAP and U+1BCA1 CONTINUING OVERLAP express the overlapped word signs; U+1BCA2 and U+1BCA3 step the writing line down and up. There is also U+1BC9D DUPLOYAN THICK LETTER SELECTOR, which exists specifically to carry the Sloan-Duployan heavy-stroke R.¹⁵

Two script-specific symbols are worth knowing: U+1BC9C, the Chinook *Likalisti* (eucharist) sign, and U+1BC9F, the Chinook punctuation mark — both artefacts of the Kamloops Wawa's liturgical content that ended up permanently in the Unicode standard.¹

Will it render?

Often not. Duployan is a demanding script to implement: letters join, vowels rotate and mirror based on their neighbours, and circles resize to fit. That is far beyond what a static glyph table can express, so a conforming font needs substantial shaping logic. Very few fonts attempt it. The main free implementation is **dscorbett/duployan-font**, which also provides an online keyboard.⁶ Because of this, the tables above give **code points and letter names rather than glyphs** — a design decision, not an omission. If you see empty boxes elsewhere on the web when Duployan is quoted, this is why.

Reading Duployan today

Wikipedia describes the script's present status as "historic and hobbyist usage."¹ That is fair for the European stenographies. The Chinook writing case is different and deserves care: it is part of the documentary record of several First Nations, and the *Kamloops Wawa* corpus — around a decade of it digitised and freely readable through Early Canadiana Online — is a substantial body of Chinook Jargon and Interior Salish text.²⁴

It is worth being honest about the context. Chinuk pipa was created by a missionary to spread church teaching, and the *Kamloops Wawa* was largely liturgical. It was also, demonstrably, taken up and spread by Indigenous people who found it useful, and Charlie Alexis Mayous taught more people to read it than Le Jeune ever did. Both facts are true at once, and a guide that reports only one of them is not reporting the script accurately.

What this page does not cover

• There is **no widely agreed alphabetical order** for Duployan. The sequence implied by the Unicode allocation was invented for the encoding proposal, not inherited from practice.¹
• Full letter-by-letter charts for each adaptation are not reproduced here. The Unicode code chart and the original proposal document give them properly, with glyphs.³⁵
• The Galloway and Brandt English adaptations exist but were **not** included in the Unicode proposal, so they have no code points and are not covered.¹
• This page has not been reviewed by any of the communities whose languages the *Kamloops Wawa* recorded.

• Proposal to include Duployan script and Shorthand Format Controls in the UCS (Van Anderson, 2010)reference — The authoritative description of the script — structure, every adaptation, and full glyph charts
• Unicode code chart — Duployan, U+1BC00–U+1BC9Freference — Official chart with glyphs and letter names
• Unicode code chart — Shorthand Format Controls, U+1BCA0–U+1BCAFreference — The four overlap and step controls
• How the Shorthand was Introduced among the Indians (Le Jeune, ed. Poser)primary source — Le Jeune's own account of Mayous and the spread of the script, in the Northwest Journal of Linguistics
• Kamloops Wawa (1891–1900), Early Canadiana Onlineprimary source — The digitised newspaper — the largest body of Duployan text in any language
• Chinook and shorthand rudiments (Le Jeune, Kamloops, 1898)primary source — Le Jeune's own teaching manual for chinuk pipa
• duployan-fonttool — The main free font implementation, plus an online keyboard — you will need this to display Duployan at all
• Kamloops Chinuk Wawa, Chinuk pipa, and the vitality of pidgins (Robertson, 2012)C1–C2 — Doctoral study of the variety the newspaper recorded