Miami–Illinois (endonym: myaamia,[a] [mjɑːmia])[3] is an Indigenous Algonquian language spoken in the United States, primarily in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, western Ohio and adjacent areas along the Mississippi River by the Miami and Wea as well as the tribes of the Illinois Confederation, including the Kaskaskia, Peoria, Tamaroa, and possibly Mitchigamea.
Due to the low quality of many records and the complex post-contact history of the groups concerned, the dialectology of Miami–Illinois is difficult to reconstruct for any historical period, but by the end of the 19th century dialectal diversity was minimal, being limited to a modest three-way division between Peoria, Miami proper, and Wea.
The Miami–Illinois of the first period is recorded primarily by French Catholic missionaries in what is now Illinois, beginning with a collection of prayers, instruction, and catechisms written by Claude-Jean Allouez (possibly with Sébastien Rale's assistance) in Kaskaskia in the late 17th century.
Two other notable sources from this time period are extant: a 185-page word list compiled by Antoine-Robert Le Boullenger with about 3,300 items, along with 42 pages of untranslated religious material, and an anonymous 672-page dictionary probably intended as a field lexicon.
Probably obtained from the Kaskaskia tribe, among whom the French had set up a mission, these documents doubtless approximate the lingua franca of the Illinois Confederation as a whole.
[5] During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Miami–Illinois people experienced a rapid population decline due to introduced diseases, depredations by neighboring tribes (especially the Iroquois), the Northwest Indian War, and subsequent Anglo-American colonisation.
In contrast to the French missionary literature, Anglo-American documentation of the language from this period varies widely in both extent and quality.
The Miami chief Little Turtle's visit to Philadelphia created some interest in his culture, leading to two word lists of reasonable quality - one apparently commissioned by Thomas Jefferson.
The most significant materials of the early 19th century are the linguistic and ethnographic notes of Charles Trowbridge and an anonymous 42-page Wea Primer written for Protestant missionaries in Kansas in 1837.
In 1867, these groups left Kansas and entered the Indian Territory to settle in the Quapaw Agency, where they would be joined by the Piankeshaw and Wea simultaneously forced out of Indiana.
English served naturally as the lingua franca of the Quapaw Agency, and minority languages soon underwent attrition.
Nonetheless, the Miami–Illinois of this period has left valuable documentation due to the work of trained linguists and ethnographers in the area.
Albert Gatschet recorded several examples of connected speech, including mythological narratives, and Truman Michelson elicited grammatical material and stories.
The documentation of the 1950s and 1960s shows a language in the advanced stages of attrition, as seen in Herbert Bussard's notes on the speech of Ross Bundy (possibly the last speaker in Indiana).
The grammatical complexity of Bundy's Miami was significantly reduced and analogised to English in comparison to "standard" (i.e. 19th-century and revitalised) Miami–Illinois.
"[8] It is directed by Daryl Baldwin, who taught himself Miami from historic documents and studies held by the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives, and has developed educational programs.
Published language and culture resources include: A related project at Miami University concerns ethnobotany, which "pairs Miami-language plant names with elders' descriptions of traditional plant-gathering techniques.
The 18th-century Illinois recorded in the French mission period also permitted intervocalic clusters -sp- and -sk-, but these have merged with -hp- and -hk- in modern Miami.
In the Wea Primer (1837), this consonant – written as
Initial vowel deletion appears to take preaspiration (-h-) with it before stops, but not before fricatives, which remain distinct from their simple counterparts (perhaps because of the assimilation of /hs/ and /hš/ to /sː/ and /ʃː/).
In the Peoria of Oklahoma resident Nancy Stand, recorded briefly in the 1930s by Charles Voegelin, many vowels appear to be reduced to a schwa /ə/.
[15] The contextual rules behind vowel reduction are unclear, and since no other Miami–Illinois text indicates any similar process, it appears to be a case of English influence.
Other characteristically Algonquian features are a distinction between animate and inanimate gender on both nouns and verbs and a syntactic category of obviation.
Miami–Illinois noun inflection distinguishes two genders (animate vs. inanimate), two numbers (singular vs. plural), and four cases (proximate, obviative, locative, and vocative).
Many of these unexpectedly animate nouns have a special significance in traditional Miami–Illinois culture, and the gender assignment for some can be traced back to Proto-Algonquian.
Categories with unpredictable internal gender assignments include body parts (kiloonkwa 'your cheek' but kihkiwani 'your nose') and names for plants.
The precise type of position, which is disambiguated by different prepositions in English, is in Miami–Illinois simply assumed from context: ahkwaanteeminki 'at the door', aciyonki 'on the hill', ahkihkonki 'in the bucket'.