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Orthography

There are three writing systems that can be used with Hîsyêô: one that uses Latin encoding characters, one that uses Latin-extended encoding characters, and a heavily modified version of Kikakui. Here's an example sentence in Hîsyêô that covers much of the possible syllables (not a complete pangram due to the syllabic writing systems):

 zowo  hônyo  cûtî  bûlo  fîkî  ulyô  socok  xe  kôs  zoston  mût  boxô  dîzel  yê  zowo  legêfû  onô. The quick brown fox starts to jump over the lazy dog

Check out the phonology page for details about which phonemes are available.

Letin​

Using most of the standard alphabetic characters that are employed by many European languages, the Letin orthography is the one that may be most familiar to most people due to the wide usage of Latin orthographies in many large primary and secondary language users. However, due to the larger than normal vowel distinctions and the phonological transcription, there are more vowels than the Latin encoding has vowel characters. Due to this, usage of diacritics is necessary.

Diacritics

There are two common diacritics used: the circumflex and the diaresis. This site used to be written using the diaresis (and one vowel had a single dot ⟨İ i⟩ whereas the non-diacritical version was dotless ⟨I ı⟩. This was changed to a circumflex ⟨Î î⟩ due to some possible misinterpretations of vowels and because the circumflex is both featural and often is used for similar changes in natural languages. That being said, there is only one diacritic used in the orthography so which one you use isn't really a major concern. Learning the vowel pairs should be done separately from a written association.

Letin-Hîsyokûî​

There is another Latin encoding that uses characters that are less-commonly representative of vowels. While this is primarily to allow a special font to be used to write the Hîsyokûî script without any changes to your computer or mobile device's keyboard settings, it also could become the standard approach for usernames, web domains, or other applications that don't work well with diacritics.

Hîskonû​

Based on the abugida writing system Likanu created for Kokanu. However, due to the large phoneme inventory, there were many modifications to make it fit. This system uses symbols that are available in some large unicode-supporting fonts but there may be some compatibility issues. Additionally, kerning is usually not well-supported because these characters aren't commonly used together in the way that this system uses them. The example below is making use of Noto Sans but Charis SIL and Gentium Plus are two other supporting fonts.

Hîsyokûî​

The official and primary writing system of Hîsyêô is Hîsyokûî. Based on the syllabic writing system Kikakui created by Mohamed Turay in 1917. Due to the larger phoneme inventory of Hîsyêô compared to Mende, only seventeen glyphs were selected to form the base consonants of Hîsyokûî. The medials (vowels) are extra strokes/flourishes added to the base consonant. Additionally, the vowel diacritic is present in this script as well to differentiate between the vowel pairs. Lastly, the script uses a top diacritic to represent codas similar to the Hîskonû script. The video content will be done only in the Hîsyokûî script but the website content is presented in all three scripts.