For the pronunciation of the letters of the alphabet, see Osage language § Phonology or the links below.
The 2014 vowel letters are as follows:
Long vowels are indicated with a macron, high tone by an acute accent, and a long vowel with high tone by a double acute accent: e.g. oral ⟨𐒰̄ 𐓘̄⟩ Ā ā, ⟨𐒰́ 𐓘́⟩ Á á, ⟨𐒰̋ 𐓘̋⟩ Ā́ ā́, nasal ⟨𐒰̄͘ 𐓘̄͘⟩ Ą̄ ą̄, ⟨𐒰́͘ 𐓘́͘⟩ Ą́ ą́, ⟨𐒰̋͘ 𐓘̋͘⟩ Ą̄́ ą̄́.
Ə and Ə̨ are not phonemic, but unstressed allophones of A and Ą.
The a comes from Latin ⟨A⟩ (without the crossbar, as in the NASA insignia "worm" logo), e from Latin cursive ⟨Ɑ⟩ (the 'long' sound of the English letter a is rather like Osage e). The source for i is obscure, though Latin ⟨I⟩ does appear inside ⟨Λ⟩ for the diphthong ai.
The 2014 consonant letters and digraphs are as follows. As in Latin orthography, the ejective consonants are written with a diacritic, and the strongly aspirated stops with digraphs. The pre-aspirated stops were originally written as digraphs with h, but since they vary by dialect with geminates, the 2014 revision included new letters for them derived by adding a cross-bar.
Px and pš are allophones, as are kx ~ kš and tx ~ ch (tsh). Hy and ky are sequences rather than single consonants.
The source of 𐓄 is Latin ⟨P⟩, that of t is Latin ⟨D⟩ (an alternative transcription of Osage t), č is from ⟨Ch⟩, k from ⟨K⟩. C is from ⟨T⟩ with the Osage s. S and z are the top halves of ⟨S⟩ and ⟨Z⟩; š and ž are derived from adding a tail to the full letters, much like Latin ⟨ʒ⟩. Br is a ligatures of the letters br. M, n and l appear to be from their cursive Latin forms, and ð is a ligature of ⟨Th⟩, which is how it is often transcribed. W is a partial ⟨w⟩. X is from cursive ⟨x⟩; it was originally at a 45-degree (x-like) angle before it was split into x and inverted gh. H is obscure, but hy may be from the ⟨s⟩ of ⟨sh⟩, and h from hy. Ligatures for sc (sts) and sk were retired when the alphabet was reformed for Unicode encoding.
Words are separated by a space. Syllables were originally separated by a full stop, but that practice has ceased with increasing literacy.
A meeting to reform the script in 2014 in preparation for Unicode encoding agreed on five changes:
Main article: Osage (Unicode block)
The Osage alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in June, 2016 with the release of version 9.0.
The Unicode block for Osage is U+104B0–U+104FF:
"Osage Nation Language Department". Archived from the original on 2011-11-20. https://web.archive.org/web/20111120021201/http://www.osagetribe.com/language/about_us.aspx ↩
Everson, Michael; Lookout, Herman Mongrain; Pratt, Cameron (2014-09-21). "Final proposal to encode the Osage script in the UCS: ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2, Document N4619" (PDF). The Unicode Consortium. Retrieved 2015-01-10. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14214-n4619-osage.pdf ↩
"Unicode version 9.0.0". The Unicode Consortium. 2016-06-21. http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode9.0.0/ ↩