Among the Athabaskan languages further to the west, syllabics have been used at one point or another to write Dakelh (Carrier), Chipewyan, Slavey, Tłı̨chǫ (Dogrib), and Dane-zaa (Beaver).

Cree syllabics were created in a process that culminated in 1840 by James Evans, a missionary, probably in collaboration with Indigenous language experts.

Evans had been inspired by the success of Sequoyah's Cherokee syllabary[failed verification] after encountering problems with Latin-based alphabets, and drew on his knowledge of Devanagari and Pitman shorthand.

As was common at the time, the orthography called for hyphens between the syllables of words, giving written Ojibwe a partially syllabic structure.

[1] Such a system, now called an abugida, would have readily lent itself to writing a language such as Swampy Cree, which had a simple syllable structure of only eight consonants and four long or short vowels.

The Hudson's Bay Company, which had a monopoly on foreign commerce in western Canada, refused to import a press for him, believing that native literacy was something to be discouraged.

In 1856, John Horden, an Anglican missionary at Moose Factory, Ontario, who adapted syllabics to the local James Bay Cree dialect, met a group of Inuit from the region of Grande Rivière de la Baleine in northern Quebec.

He prepared a few based on their pronunciation of Inuktitut, but it quickly became obvious that the number of basic sounds and the simple model of the syllable in the Evans system was inadequate to the language.

In the 1880s, John William Tims, an Anglican missionary from Great Britain, invented a number of new forms to write the Blackfoot language.

Oblate father Adrien-Gabriel Morice adapted syllabics to Dakelh, inventing a large number of new basic characters to support the radically more complicated phonetics of Athabaskan languages.

Father Émile Petitot developed syllabic scripts for many of the Athabaskan languages of the Northwest Territories, including Slavey and Chipewyan.

In the 1930s, Chief Fine Day of the Sweetgrass First Nation told Mandelbaum the following account:[14][9]: 20 A Wood Cree named Badger-call died and then became alive again.

Calling Badger told the people of the things he was shown that prophesized events in the future, then he pulled out some pieces of birch bark with symbols on them.

[3] Linguist Chris Harvey believes that the syllabics were a collaboration between English missionaries and Indigenous Cree- and Ojibwe-language experts, Such as the Ojibwe Henry Bird Steinhauer (Sowengisik) and Cree translator Sophie Mason, who worked alongside Evans at his time in Norway House.

[17] The original script, which was designed for Western Swampy Cree, had ten such letterforms: eight for syllables based on the consonants p-, t-, c-, k-, m-, n-, s-, y- (pronounced /p, t, ts, k, m, n, s, j/), another for vowel-initial syllables, and finally a blended form, now obsolete, for the consonant cluster sp-.

(-l and -r are now written the size of full letters when they occur before vowels, as the finals were originally, or in some syllabics scripts have been replaced with full rotating syllabic forms; -h only occurs before a vowel in joined morphemes, in couple grammatical words, or in pedagogical materials to indicate the consonant value following it is fortis.

By 1841, when Evans cast the first movable type for syllabics, he found that he could not satisfactorily maintain the distinction between light and heavy typeface for short and long vowels.

[1] Reflecting the shorthand principles on which it was based, syllabics may be written plain, indicating only the basic consonant–vowel outline of speech, or pointed, with diacritics for vowel length and the consonants /w/ and /h/.

Some common terms as used in the context of syllabics The full-sized characters, whether standing for consonant-vowel combinations or vowels alone, are usually called "syllables".

In Naskapi, a small raised letter based on sa is used for consonant clusters that begin with /s/: ᔌ spwa, ᔍ stwa, ᔎ skwa, and ᔏ scwa.

Diacritics used by other languages include a ring above on Moose Cree ᑬ kay (encoded as "kaai"), head ring on Ojibwe ᕓ fe, head barb on Inuktitut ᖤ lha, tail barb on West Cree ᖌ ro, centred stroke (a small vertical bar) in Carrier ᗇ ghee, centred dot in Carrier ᗈ ghi, centred bar (a bar perpendicular to the body) in Cree ᖨ thi, and a variety of other marks.

Round form, known in Cree as Kâ-wâwiyêyaki, is akin to a proportional font, characterised by their smooth bowls, differing letter heights, and occupying a rectangular space.

The Eastern Cree dialect has distinct labialized finals, ⟨ᒄ⟩ -kw and ⟨ᒽ⟩ -mw; these are written with raised versions of the o-series rather than the usual a-series, as in ᒥᔅᑎᒄ mistikw "tree".

Although in most respects Naskapi follows eastern Cree conventions, it does not mark vowel length at all and uses two dots, either placed above or before a syllable, to indicate a w: ⟨ᐛ⟩ wa, ⟨ᐖ⟩ wo, ⟨ᑥ⟩ twa, ⟨ᒂ⟩ kwa, ⟨ᒠ⟩ cwa (/tswa/), ⟨ᒺ⟩ mwa, ⟨ᓏ⟩ nwa, ⟨ᔄ⟩ swa, ⟨ᔽ⟩ ywa.

See also: The eastern form of Cree syllabics was adapted to write the Inuktitut dialects of Nunavut (except for the extreme west, including Kugluktuk and Cambridge Bay) and Nunavik in northern Quebec.

The e-series was originally used for the common diphthong /ai/, but this was officially dropped in the 1960s so that Inuktitut would not have more characters than could be moulded onto an IBM Selectric typewriter ball, with -ai written as an a-series syllable followed by ⟨ᐃ⟩ i.

A raised na-ga is prefixed to the g-series to create an ng (/ŋ/) series: ⟨ᖓ⟩ nga, etc., and the na is doubled for geminate nng (/ŋː/): ⟨ᙵ⟩ nnga.

The rapid growth in the scope and quantity of material published in syllabics has, by all appearances, ended any immediate prospect of marginalisation for this writing system.

Later, as governments became more accommodating of native languages, and in some cases even encouraged their use, it was widely believed that moving to a Latin alphabet was better, both for linguistic reasons and to reduce the cost of supporting multiple scripts.

Even though it was originally the invention of European missionaries, many people consider syllabics a writing system that belongs to them, and associate Latin letters with linguistic assimilation.