The Yugtun or Alaska script is a syllabary invented around the year 1900 by Uyaquq to write the Central Alaskan Yup'ik language.

Uyaquq, who was monolingual in Yup'ik but had a son who was literate in English,[2] initially used Indigenous pictograms as a form of proto-writing that served as a mnemonic in preaching the Bible.

However, when he realized that this did not allow him to reproduce the exact words of a passage the way the Latin alphabet did for English-speaking missionaries, he and his assistants developed it until it became a full syllabary.

[2] The syllable kut, for example, resembles the cursive form of the English word good.

The Yup'ik language is now generally written in the Latin alphabet.