Photo: BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives from Canada: Two Gitxsan First Nation girls in a dugout cedar canoe. | Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
Every day, Gitxsan Hereditary Chief Sim'oo'git Geel (Catherine Blackstock) completes a word-guessing game. "Maadim was the word yesterday, which is the 'snow that's falling." Not Wordle - Gitksan is modeled after the popular online game but features words in Gitxsanimx, the language of the Gitxsan Nation in northwestern British Columbia. Linguist Aidan Pine adapted Wordle's five-letter structure to the Gitxsanimx alphabet, which often uses combinations of letters and punctuation such as "gw" and "ky'" to express specific phonetic sounds, by including special keys featuring multiple letters that count as a single character. Preserving the language goes back generations, Pine says. "Every word that is in that word guessing game was remembered, and held onto by somebody who survived residential school and a host of other terrible policies that tried to eradicate the usage of that language."
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