Language Families
Algonquian
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Algonquian is the language family of a large group of North American peoples, among them the Anishinaabe, Cree, Blackfoot, Miqmaq, Lenape, Shawnee and Arapaho, spread from the Atlantic coast to the Rockies. Its languages carry the ceremonial and narrative traditions of those nations, including the Midewiwin of the Anishinaabe and the terms manitou and wigwam that entered English from them. The atlas files it as a language family rather than as one culture, because the nations that speak these languages are distinct peoples with their own ceremonies and should not be merged.
Facts
Disputed
Homeland HypothesisUsually placed between the Great Lakes and the country west of them, but the range of proposals is wide, and the connection to Wiyot and Yurok in northern California pulls the reconstruction further west than the Algonquian evidence alone would. 1 Algonquian's own evidence points to the northeast of the continent. Algic, the larger grouping that adds Wiyot and Yurok, is accepted, and those two languages are spoken on the Pacific coast, which is hard to reconcile with a northeastern origin for the whole. The camps differ over which fact to weigh: a homeland placed to satisfy Algic has to explain how Algonquian reached the east, and one placed to satisfy Algonquian has to explain how Wiyot and Yurok reached the west. There is no archaeological horizon tied to either account the way Sintashta is tied to Indo-Iranian. Status
Classification StatusEstablished, and Proto-Algonquian is among the most thoroughly reconstructed proto-languages of the Americas. 1 Leonard Bloomfield's reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian is a standard demonstration that the comparative method works on languages with no written history, since none of the Algonquian languages was recorded before contact. The family's membership in the wider Algic grouping, with Wiyot and Yurok, is also accepted, though it was resisted for decades after it was first proposed. Attestation
Earliest AttestationNothing before European contact. The earliest records are seventeenth century wordlists and missionary texts, among them Roger Williams on Narragansett and the Massachusett Bible, and everything earlier is reconstruction. 1 Learn More
Manitou, and a Family Across a Continent
Algonquian is one of the largest language families in North America, running from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains and from Labrador to North Carolina, and it includes Cree, Ojibwe, Blackfoot, Miqmaq, Innu, Lenape, Shawnee, Arapaho, Cheyenne and many others. Lyle Campbell's survey of the historical linguistics of native North America sets out the family and the reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian, which is one of the best established proto-languages anywhere outside Indo-European, worked out in detail because the daughter languages are numerous and well recorded.
The word manitou comes from this family and has been carried into English with most of its meaning stripped out of it. In the languages themselves it refers to spiritual power, or to a being holding such power, and the Ojibwe compound that missionaries took up for God did not originally name a single supreme deity. That translation is a good example of the wider problem, because a great deal of what is written about Algonquian religion is written in vocabulary shaped by the people who were replacing it, and the shape survives in the sources long after the intention behind it has been forgotten.
The peoples in this family hold distinct religions with their own ceremonies, societies and restrictions, and the atlas treats them under their own names rather than as a single tradition that happens to share a grammar.
Wordlists, Syllabics and Language Revival
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The Midewiwin belongs to the Anishinaabe, an Algonquian-speaking nation.
The family spreads across northern and eastern North America.
Related To
Ojibwe is an Algonquian language.
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