OJIBWE LANGUAGE

OJIBWE LANGUAGE is a Native American tongue that is still spoken by an estimated 60,000 speakers. The language is indigenous to the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana and the Canadian provinces of Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Although dialects vary significantly across the region, this does not pose a significant barrier to communication. Ojibwe is also closely related to Potawatomi and Ottawa and more distantly related to other languages in the Algonquian language family.

Fluency rates for Ojibwe vary from 1 percent in some communities to 100 percent in others. Ojibwe is one of only twenty Native American languages that scholars believe will survive through the twenty-first century. Ojibwe is under pressure in many areas, and tribal governments and schools have been active in trying to revitalize the language. Some immersion programs and schools have been initiated, but it remains to be seen if those endeavors will have the same success that Maori, Blackfeet, or Native Hawaiian efforts have enjoyed.

The exact date when the Ojibwe language evolved to its present form is not known. However, linguists believe that Ojibwe is a very ancient language that has been in existence for over 1,000 years. Older variants of Ojibwe (or Proto-Algonquian) date back several thousand years. The Ojibwe people devised a system of writing on birch bark long before contact with Europeans. However, this writing system functioned as mnemonic devices rather than as modern orthography. In 1848, a syllabic orthography was developed for the Ojibwe language that enjoyed widespread success and use, especially in Canada. For many years, the Ojibwe and Cree had one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Other systems were developed over the years, and there is still no single universally accepted orthography. However, the double-vowel system devised by C. E. Fiero in 1945 is now the most widely accepted and used writing system for the Ojibwe language. Unlike most languages of the world, morphological components of Ojibwe are known to everyday speakers. Thus, Ojibwe offers layers of meaning and description that make it a cornerstone of cultural knowledge and a spectacular medium for story telling.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Krauss, Michael. "Status of Native Language Endangerment." In Stabilizing Indigenous Languages. Edited by Gina Cantoni. Flagstaff: Northern Arizona State University, 1996.

Nichols, John D., and Earl Nyholm. A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Treuer, Anton, ed. Living Our Language: Ojibwe Tales & Oral Histories. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001.

AntonTreuer

See alsoIndian Languages .