Ojibwe writing systems

Ojibwe is one of the largest Native American languages north of Mexico in terms of number of speakers and is characterized by a series of dialects, some of which differ significantly.

The dialects of Ojibwe are spoken in Canada from southwestern Quebec, through Ontario, Manitoba and parts of Saskatchewan, with outlying communities in Alberta and British Columbia,[1][2] and in the United States from Michigan through Wisconsin and Minnesota, with a number of communities in North Dakota and Montana, as well as migrant groups in Kansas and Oklahoma.

[2][3] The absence of linguistic or political unity among Ojibwe-speaking groups is associated with the relative autonomy of the regional dialects of Ojibwe.

The double vowel system is quickly gaining popularity among language teachers in the United States and Canada because of its ease of use.

Anishinaabewibii'iganan can refer to the body of Ojibwe writings found as petroglyphs, on story-hides, and on Midewiwin wiigwaasabakoon,[8] similar to the Mi'kmaw Suckerfish script.

[9] In treaty negotiations with the British, the treaty-signing chiefs would often mark an "X" for their signature and then use the Wiigwaasabak character representing their doodem.

Today, Ojibwe artists commonly incorporate motifs found in the Wiigwaasabak to instill "Native Pride."

The double vowel orthography is an adaptation of the linguistically oriented system found in publications such as Leonard Bloomfield's Eastern Ojibwa.

By comparison, folk phonetic spelling approaches to writing Ottawa based on less systematic adaptations of written English or French are more variable and idiosyncratic and do not always make consistent use of alphabetic letters.

[13] Letters of the English alphabet substitute for specialized phonetic symbols, in conjunction with orthographic conventions unique to Ojibwe.

In the final syllable of a word the long vowel is followed by word-final ⟨nh⟩ to indicate that it is nasal; the use of ⟨h⟩ is an orthographic convention and does not correspond to an independent sound.

[23] The nasalized allophones of the vowels, which occur predictably preceding the nasal+fricative clusters ns, nz, and nzh are not indicated in writing, in words such as gaawiin ingikendanziin "I don't know it", jiimaanens "small boat", and oshkanzhiin "someone's fingernail(s)".

A minor variant of the double vowel system is used to write the Ottawa and Eastern Ojibwe varieties spoken in Michigan and southwestern Ontario, as exemplified in a prominent dictionary.

[29] Other publications making use of the same system include a reference grammar[30] and a collection of texts dictated by an Ottawa speaker from Walpole Island First Nation, Ontario.

Since vowel syncope occurs frequently in the Ottawa and Eastern Ojibwe dialects, additional consonant clusters arise.

[34] The Ottawa-Eastern Ojibwe variant of the Double vowel system treats the digraphs sh, zh, ch as two separate letters for purposes of alphabetization.

However, since that requires the knowledge of how the speaker themself speaks, folk spelling quickly becomes difficult to read for those individuals not familiar with the writer.

Prominent Ottawa author Basil Johnston has explicitly rejected it, preferring to use a form of folk spelling in which the correspondences between sounds and letters are less systematic.

[46][47] James Evans, a missionary from Kingston upon Hull, UK, had prepared the Speller and Interpreter in English and Indian.

Furthermore, the structure of the Ojibwe language made most words quite long when spelled with Latin letters, and Evans himself found this approach awkward.

Bishop Frederic Baraga, in his years as a missionary to the Ojibwa and the Odawa, became the foremost grammarian of Anishinaabemowin during the latter half of the 19th century.

His work A Dictionary of the Otchipwe Language, explained in English is still considered the best reference regarding the Ojibwe vocabulary of western Upper Peninsula of Michigan and northern Wisconsin.

Wesleyan clergyman James Evans devised the syllabary in 1840–1841 while serving as a missionary among speakers of Swampy Cree in Norway House in Rupert's Land (now northern Manitoba).

[55][56] The least common are those who use a mixture of a-position, i-position, and o-position series in their smaller version as finals, dependent on the word root.

[57] The examples in the table are cited from Neskantaga, Ontario (Lansdowne House), a community assigned to the Northwestern Ojibwe dialect.

[59] Vowel length is phonologically contrastive in Ojibwe but is frequently not indicated by syllabics writers;[60] for example, the words aakim 'snowshoe' and akim 'count him, them!'

Not shown in the sample table are the characters representing non-Ojibwe sounds f th l r. All syllabics-using Ojibwe communities use p with an internal ring to represent f, typically ᕓ, ᕕ, ᕗ, ᕙ and ᕝ, and most use t with an internal ring to represent th, typically ᕞ, ᕠ, ᕤ, ᕦ and ᕪ, but variations do exist on the placement of the internal ring; in some communities where the s have transitioned to th, ᑌᐦ, ᑎᐦ, ᑐᐦ, ᑕᐦ and ᐟᐦ sequence is instead found.

The syllabics-using communities can be classified into: Not part of the Unicode standard, thus not shown in the sample table above, is an obsolete set of syllabics form representing šp-series, or the sp-series in those communities where š have merged with s. Originally this series looked like "Z" or "N" and had the same orientation scheme as ᔐ še, ᔑ, ši ᔓ šo and ᔕ ša.

This obsolete set has been replaced with either ᔥᐯ/ᐡᐯ špe, ᔥᐱ/ᐡᐱ špi, ᔥᐳ/ᐡᐳ špo, and ᔥᐸ/ᐡᐸ špa; or by ᐢᐯ spe, ᐢᐱ spi, ᐢᐳ spo and ᐢᐸ spa.

The Great Lakes Algonquian syllabary is a syllabic writing system based upon the French alphabet, with letters organized into syllables.