Once you know a secret language exists…the cat’s out of the bag; it’s no longer very secretive. Or is it? What if hardly anyone else can speak or write that language? That might present an opportunity and a complication.

In A Bride for Brynmor, my heroine, Lark (an Irish-Cree Métis singer and musican born in Qu’Appelle Valley—in present day Saskatchewan, Canada), writes the following letter to her sisters, Oriole and Wren…so that only they can decipher her message. 

Languages like Secrets are Complicated

I have great difficulties speaking different languages, but I’ve discovered I enjoy the challenges/complications of including them in my stories.

• For my Quebec-born heroine, Birdie Bell (aka Bernadette Bellamy), I added French in The Calling Birds. 
• For my American-born heroine, Robyn Llewellyn (whose ancestors came from Monmouth, Wales) I added Welsh in Robyn: A Christmas Bride.
• And now for my Irish-Cree Métis heroines, I’ve added Cree syllabics in A Bride for Brynmor.

What are Cree syllabics?

• They are a script used to write the Cree language. They include nine glyph shapes which stand for a syllable with the vowels determined by the orientations of the shapes.
• In the past, the script was valued because most Cree found it easy to learn and it was visually distinctive from the Latin script of English and French.
• Today in Canada (from Saskatchewan in the west to the Hudson Bay in the east), it’s estimated that over 70,000 Algonquian-speaking people use the script.

Who Created Cree syllabics?

• It was long believed that a missionary and amateur linguist (from Yorkshire, England) was the original inventor of this syllabics writing system. But new evidence suggests that the Cree people already knew the system and the missionary (who was working in what is now Manitoba, Canada) simply adapted it for print.
• In 1841 Manitoba, a Cree syllabics hymnbook was published. In 1859 London, The New Testament was published in Cree.  

When a Secret Language shapes the Past and the Present

How are Cree syllabics making a complication in my story-in-progress? They shape the past and present of my Métis heroines who (after their Cree mothers died) grew up in a missionary orphanage in Saskatchewan, but now find themselves in Colorado—trying to run away from their complicated pasts. Here’s an excerpt…

A Bride for Brynmor – Excerpt

“May I leave a letter with you for my sisters who may come looking for me here?” Lark asked. 


“Yes, but if they also have secret names”—the music shop owner huffed as she shook her head over the possibility—“you’d best write all of your names on your letter so I don’t forget.”


Lark suspected Mrs. Fitzpatrick had never forgotten anything in her life. She pulled her notebook and pencil from her pocket and, in plain view of the shop owner, wrote: ᐄᐦᐄ

“I shudder to ask,” the woman said as she frowned at the foreign letters, “but have you invented a language as well?”


Lark shook her head. “These symbols may not be well-known, but they’re no secret.” She kept writing in the script used by her mother’s people who lived north of the border in Canada.


Despite the missionaries wanting her and her sisters to learn only the colonial languages—to better assimilate them into the white world—Lark had taught Oriole and Wren to write in Cree. Their heritage was the second thing they’d bonded over in the orphanage. The first had been none of them speaking French in a community where most of the Métis and the missionaries shared that ancestry.

When she’d finished writing, her letter read:

Which translated to:

Enemy in sight!
Go to three brothers with red hair inhabiting Falcon’s storehouse
Or to Robin and Falcon family in the town noel
Meadowlark

~ * ~

You can read A Bride for Brynmor’s book blurb and opening scene on my website. 

Have you ever used a secret language?