In 1997 the first designs of Allatuq were made while Michael Everson was doing some work with the Baffin Divisional Board of Education in what is now Nunavut (but was still Northwest Territories then). The font contained The basic Latin ASCII characters and what Inuktitut characters were able to be fit into an 8-bit “MacInuit” character set Michael had developed. “Allatuq” means “What has been written” in the dialect of Inuktitut spoken in northern Québec.

The font is to look hand-drawn, as though by a child copying more or less carefully from a handwriting sampler. Although Comic Sans came out in 1994, and Allatuq designed in 1997 (the 1.0 release was Patrick’s Day 1998), Michael doubts that he had even heard of Comic Sans when he was was designing Allatuq.

When the opportunity came to revise the font for the Kativik School Board in Québec, Michael decided it would be best to re-draw everything from scratch. And... well, being a Unicode guru, he decided to add support for more characters. Allatuq contains a fairly large set of Latin characters, including the IPA block. It supports the entire set of Canadian Syllabics, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Cherokee, Armenian, and Georgian. Further additions are planned.

In 2010 Allatuq version 2.1 was released in OpenType format, completely compliant with Unicode encoding and with an extended character set. In 2012 Allatuq version 3.0 was released with an oblique face.

Allatuq is pronounced [ˈalːatʊq] in Inuktitut, and [ˈæləˌtʊk] in English.