Ancestral Type, Lakota language

Seoyoung Lee
2 min readFeb 20, 2023

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Bobby Joe Smith iii, a black and Lakota graphic designer, generated a speculative writing system for native Lakota speakers to share values, visual vocabulary, and mark-making tools of Lakota.

Lakota is a dialect of Sioux Language, along with Dakota. They are most spoken indigenous language in north America

Lakota, a Siouan language, is originally an unwritten language. He employed the visual vocabulary of his culture to create a new orthography, an attempt for decolonizations. It is a celebration and visualization of the Lakota culture.

He applied variety of Lakota traditional mark making method such as bead and quillwork, paint, sign language.

However, due to its non-linear characteristics, I speculate that the text has to be image based rather utilizing unicode, if it were to be implemented in the digital setting.

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Phoneme

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