14th of December, 2025
Adding support for minority British languages to a font

The British Isles are home to over a dozen minority languages. To fully support their orthographies, you need a range of diacritics, one modification, and one new character. However, a font that supports common West-European languages like French, Spanish, and German is well on the way to supporting the full British orthography too.

Note: The character sets below are written in a certain way: letters with marks. This means that all the letters (in upper- and lowercase) need to be paired with all of the marks. For instance, “a e with acute grave” means “a-acute, a-grave, e-acute, e-grave”.

Welsh

a e i o u w y with acute circumflex dieresis grave

Scottish Gaelic

a e i o u with grave and a e o with acute

Irish

a e i o u with acute, b c d f g m p s t with dot, and ⁊ (lowercase Tironian et, U+204A) and ⹒ (uppercase Tironian et, U+2E52, rare, may not display right)

Manx

c with cedilla

Cornish

a e o u with circumflex grave, i with circumflex, and e y with dieresis

In total, you need a e i o u w y with acute circumflex dieresis grave, c with cedilla, b c d f g m p s t with dot, and the Tironian et (definitely the small/regular one, optionally the uppercase one).

This list doesn't include cants, Traveller and Romani languages, Scots or Ulster Scots, or the Channel Islands languages. Those either don't have consistent (or any) written forms, or don't use characters beyond the English Latin alphabet (A to Z).