Chippewa language

Chippewa (native name: Anishinaabemowin;[4] also known as Southwestern Ojibwa/Ojibwe/Ojibway/Ojibwemowin) is an Algonquian language spoken from upper Michigan westward to North Dakota in the United States.

The Chippewa dialects have been the focus of many academic works, from William Whipple Warren and Fr.

Frederick Baraga in the 19th century, and Frances Densmore, Jan P. B. de Josselin de Jong, Charles Fiero, Earl Nyholm and John Nichols in the 20th century.

Beginning in the 1970s many of the communities have aggressively put their efforts into language revitalization, but have only managed to produce some fairly educated second-language speakers.

Today, the majority of the first-language speakers of this dialect of the Ojibwe language are elderly, whose numbers are quickly diminishing, while the number of second-language speakers among the younger generation are growing.

In the summer of 2009, Anton Treuer of Bemidji State University conducted an informal survey of number of first-language speakers of the Chippewa dialects in Minnesota and Wisconsin in order to convene a language session to address the need of vocabulary associated with math and sciences.

Together with other reservations that were not surveyed, Treuer estimates only around 1,000 first-language speakers of the Chippewa dialect in the United States.

According to Ethnologue, the Chippewa Language or the Southwestern dialect of the Ojibwe language is divided into four smaller dialects: Like other varieties of Anishinaabemowin, in Chippewa a great deal of information is already contained in the words, so the sentence order can be quite free, but the primary word order is subject–verb–object.

Other classes of words include adverbs, numbers, particles, pre-nouns, and pre-verbs.

[12] Pre-verbs and pre-nouns are not whole words; however, they are modifying forms that freely combine with nouns, verbs, or adverbs to add meaning.

The Chippewa language has pronouns to show person (first, second, or third), and number (singular or plural).

[17] Consonants are comparable to their English counterparts and are written: ⟨b ch d g h ' j k l n nh p r s sh t w y z zh⟩.

There are certain consonant clusters that occur in Chippewa: sk, shp, sht, shk, mb, nd, nj, ng.