Algonquian languages were among the first in North America to be written, and the reason was religious. John Eliot printed a complete Bible in Massachusett in 1663, the first Bible printed anywhere in the Americas, and missionary grammars, catechisms and wordlists were produced across the family over the following centuries. Those documents are now doubly valuable. They are evidence of the conversion effort, and they are frequently the only surviving record of languages that later fell silent.
The syllabic script devised in the nineteenth century for Cree, and extended to Ojibwe and to Inuktitut, spread with unusual speed because it could be learned in days, and it remains in official use in Canada. Like Eliot's Bible it was made for scripture and then used for everything else.
Revival now runs the other way. Wampanoag, which had no speakers for more than a century, has been reconstructed from the surviving colonial documents, including Eliot's Bible, by a project led from within the community, and children are being raised in it again. Several Algonquian languages still have substantial numbers of speakers, Cree and Ojibwe among them, and others are being taught from archives. The atlas records the missionary record as both the instrument of loss and, unexpectedly, the material of recovery.