Encyclopedia of North American Indians -

Encyclopedia of North American Indians

Algonquian Languages

The Algonquian linguistic family encompasses those languages spoken aboriginally and currently in regions stretching from the plains to the eastern seaboard, as far south as present-day North Carolina and as far north as the Canadian Subarctic. Two languages spoken in California, Wiyot and Yurok, have distant linkages to Algonquian as well.

Linguists generally divide Algonquian languages into three regional groupings: the Plains Algonquian languages, which include Blackfoot, Cheyenne, and Arapaho-Atsina-Nawathinehena; the Central languages, which comprise Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Menominee, Sauk-Fox-Kick-apoo, Miami-Illinois, and Shawnee; and the Eastern languages, which include Micmac, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Etchemin, Eastern Abenaki (of which the modern representative is Penobscot), Western Abenaki (sometimes called St. Francis), Loup A and Loup B, Massachusett (less accurately called Natick), Narragansett, Mohegan-Pequot, Montauk, Quiripi, Unquachog, Mahican, Munsee, Unami, Nanticoke, Powhatan, and Carolina Algonquian. Most Algonquian languages are or were represented by two or more dialect variants as well. Historically, speakers of one Algonquian language were often fluent in one or more additional languages. Many Menominee speakers, for example, have spoken (or do speak) Ojibwa.

Of the more than thirty languages within this family recorded since the seventeenth century, only Arapaho, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Menominee, Sauk-Fox-Kickapoo, Maliseet-Passamaquoddy, and Micmac currently have significant numbers of speakers, and many of these are elderly. The majority of extinct Algonquian languages were spoken in the Northeast and along the Atlantic seaboard.

Techniques of historical linguistics suggest that the parent language of the Algonquian linguistic family, known as Proto-Algonquian, came to be spoken between three thousand and twenty-five hundred years ago. Reconstructed Proto-Algonquian terms for various animals and plants indicate a homeland for that language in the region between Georgian Bay and Lake Ontario. Other evidence suggests that relatively soon after the emergence of Proto-Algonquian in this area, its speakers fragmented into ten increasingly differentiated speech communities corresponding to the three Plains Algonquian languages and the six (later seven, when Potawatomi and Ojibwa separated) Central languages, as well as into an eastern community, speaking a language known as Proto-Eastern Algonquian. Isolated from the Central languages by the intervening Iroquoian language-speaking peoples of the Saint Lawrence drainage and what is now New York and western Pennsylvania, speakers of Proto-Eastern Algonquian ultimately split into the twenty or more distinct speech communities whose languages make (or made) up the Eastern Algonquian subgroup.

Although differing from one another in numerous ways, all Algonquian languages share basic patterns of inflection. Algonquian words were once described by the linguist Edward Sapir as resembling "tiny imagist poems." Sapir's analogy aptly captures the remarkable flexibility and specificity made possible by Algonquian morphological and syntactic structures. Algonquian languages mark grammatical categories of gender based not on biological sex, but rather on a distinction roughly corresponding to that in nature between living and nonliving entities—categories labeled inanimate and animate by linguists. Animate nouns include persons, animals, spirits, large trees, some fruits, some body parts, feathers, and tails, as well as pipes, snowshoes, and kettles. The assignment of nouns to animate and inanimate categories is not entirely transparent, however. For example, Munsee lehlokíhlas, "raspberry," is animate, while wtéhim, "strawberry," is inanimate.

Algonquian languages, like English, also mark number (singular and plural) and person (first, second, and third), although Algonquian languages make an additional distinction between the first person plural in which the hearer or addressee is included (first person plural inclusive) and the one in which the hearer is not included (first person plural exclusive). A further distinction is made between two third persons referred to in the same context. The further, or obviative, is marked by inflectional endings that distinguish it from the nearer third person, referred to as the proximate, as in the Cree sentence Npw atimwa wpamw, "The man [npw; proximate] saw the dog [atimwa; marked by the obviative ending -a]." Another important feature of Algonquian languages is the presence of "direction markers," which, in the absence of strict rules of word order, help to clarify the relationship between actor (or subject) and goal (object or patient) in a given sentence.

Algonquian nouns consist of stems to which both prefixes and suffixes may be added to indicate gender, number, person, and possession. Similarly, Algonquian verb stems are inflected for person, number, gender, and direction. For example, the Fox expression newapamawa, "I see him," inflects the stem wap-, "see") for person (marked by the prefix ne-), direction (with the direction marker -am-), and the gender and number of the goal (marked both by the direction marker -am- and by the suffix -awa). These and many other fascinating features of Algonquian languages have made them influential in the development of descriptive and theoretical linguistics in the United States and elsewhere.

Translations of Western religious works, particularly the Bible, have been made into various Algonquian languages since the seventeenth century. The earliest Bible printed in North America was in the Massachusett language, and was published in 1663. Although unwritten before European contact, all currently spoken Algonquian languages, and some that are now extinct, have had orthographies and/or syllabaries developed for them, and several are the focus of active reading and writing programs today. Algonquian languages such as Cree and Ojibwa still serve the needs of large communities of speakers, and many of the surviving languages such as Maliseet-Passamaquoddy are now the subject of revitalization programs designed to bring the languages back into use among younger speakers.





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