Friday 7 September 2018

Interesting Things To Know About The Ojibwe Language

By Ryan Harris


The Ojibwe were a race of people who used to live in Canada in Ontario up until the US border somewhere in Montana and Michigan. They were a race of people who spoke the Ojibwe language, which is one of the rarest languages in the world as it is the native tongue of the older generation wherein the current generation don't practice it anymore. Here are a few things one might find interesting about this lost dialect.

These people were also known as the Ojibway or the Anishinaabemowin and they encompassed a couple of tribes in the area. They lived near the Great Lake somewhere in between Canada and the US. Today, that area is known as the border between Canada and the United States of America. Also, the dialect they are speaking is the Central Algonquian dialect making it one of the main languages to their community.

Even though it was one of the central languages of the past, it is actually considered endangered now by Minnesota. UNESCO actually announced that it was already included in the Atlas of Worlds Languages in Danger list as it is no longer spoken by the current generation. It is the grandparents who spoke it but their children never did anymore and more so their grandchildren or great grandchildren.

Of course, this prompted a lot of groups to try and revive as well as preserve the dialect by opening schools that teach it. What these schools aim to do is to get the next generation to try to learn how to read and write it so that it will still be there for the next generations. With that, these groups were able to come up with the Ojibway Peoples Dictionary which was used for these lessons.

For those who are new to this dialect, it is interesting to know that it makes use of a double vowel system instead of a single one like the English alphabet. So it is normal to see two vowels or even consonants together but used as a single unit. There is also an apostrophe that one can find there symbolizing a glottal stop in a sentence.

The alphabet consists of twenty four letters with a few of them not being found in the English language. To give one an idea, the letters that one can find in this alphabet are the regular letters of the alphabet and letters with the two consonants making a different sound compared to the single vowels. There is also the an aa, ee, oo, and ii which are part of the double vowel system.

There are also the nasal vowels in the alphabet. These include the aanh, oonh, eenh and the iinh. These, as the name implies, are nasal vowels that give off a nasal sound when one pronounces them.

For those who want to know more about the ancient Ojibway dialect, take note of some of these things. It is really interesting that an old language of the past is now being brought back. This is to help the current generation preserve something from the past and keep it for the newer generations to enjoy.




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