Plains Cree language
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| Plains Cree | ||
|---|---|---|
| ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ / Nêhiyawêwin | ||
| Spoken in | Canada, United States | |
| Region | Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Montana | |
| Total speakers | 34,000 | |
| Language family | Algic
|
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | cre | |
| ISO 639-3 | [1]] crk]]] | |
|
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| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Plains Cree (native name: Nêhiyawêwin) is one of the four main dialects of the Algonquian language Cree, the most common Canadian indigenous language. Although no single dialect of Cree is favored over another, Plains Cree is the most widely used. Out of the 80 thousand speakers of the Cree language, the Plains Cree dialect is spoken by about 34,000 people primarily in Saskatchewan and Alberta but also in Manitoba and Montana. This number is diminishing as social pressures increase to learn more common European languages, leaving many Cree children without a fluent command of their native tongue. Monolingual Plains Cree speakers are still found, however, in the more rural Cree-speaking areas, such as the Cree territory's northern reaches. These populations, nevertheless, are primarily composed of elders and are shrinking in size with unfortunate regularity.[1][2][3]
Contents |
[edit] Phonology
[edit] Consonants
The consonant inventory for Plains Cree contains 10 sounds including the semi-vowels /ɰ/ and /j/, which are glides that act like and often follow consonants. The basic voiceless phonemes /p/, /t/, /k/ and /ts/, however, are allophones with their voiced counterparts /b/, /d/, /g/ and /ds/. Plains Cree doesn't make voicing distinction and so, because the voiceless phonemes only occur at the beginnings and ends of words, the voiced counterparts are used within words.[1][3]
Plains Cree does, on the other hand, distinguish pre-aspiration in the form of a preceding /h/. This is how the instruction wīcihik "help me!" is differentiated from wīcihihk "help him!"[1]
The consonants of Plains Cree in the standard orthography are listed below (with IPA notation in brackets):
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | p /p/ | t /t/ | k /k/ | ||
| Affricate | c /ts/ | ||||
| Nasal | m /m/ | n /n/ | |||
| Fricative | s /s/ | h /h/ | |||
| Approximant | y /j/ | w /ɰ/ |
The orthographic symbol c is historically used to designate the alveolar affricate /ts/ and its allophone /ds/ in the language's Romanized form.[1][2]
[edit] Vowels
Plains Cree has seven contrastive vowels, three short and four long.[1][2][3] These vowels in the standard orthography are listed below (with IPA notation in brackets for the long vowels):
| Short | Long | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Front | Back | Front | Back | |
| High (close) | i | ī /iː/ | ||
| Mid | o | ē /eː/ | ō /oː/ | |
| Low (open) | a | ā /aː/ | ||
Vowel length is contrastive in such pairs as sakahikan "nail" and sākahikan "lake" or nipiy "water" and nīpiy "leaf".[1]
[edit] Morphology
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e f Wolfart, H. Christoph and Janet F. Carroll. (1973). Meet Cree: A guide to the Cree language. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.
- ^ a b c Wolfart, H. Christoph. (1973). Plains Cree: a Grammatical Study. American Philosophical Society Transactions n.s. 63, pt. 5. Philadelphia.
- ^ a b c Silver, S. and Wick R. Miller. (1997). American Indian Languages: Cultural and social contexts. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
[edit] Bibliography
- Wolvengrey, Arok. Nêhiyawêwin: Itwêwina. Canadian Plains Research Centre. Regina: 2001. ISBN0-88977-127-8
- Bloomfield, Leonard. Plains Cree Texts. New York: AMS Press, 1974. ISBN 0404581668
- Dahlstrom, Amy. Plains Cree Morphosyntax. Outstanding dissertations in linguistics. New York: Garland Pub, 1991. ISBN 0815301723
- Hirose, Tomio. Origins of predicates evidence from Plains Cree. Outstanding dissertations in linguistics. New York: Routledge, 2003. ISBN 0415967791
- McIlwraith, Naomi Lynne. 2007. "Nitohta anohc. Nakatohke. Now listen. Listen hard: A creative study of Nehiyawewin, the Plains Cree language, and the reasons for its preservation," University of Alberta MA thesis.
- Wolfart, H. Christoph. 1996. Sketch of Cree, an Algonquian language. In Handbook of North American Indians, ed. by Ives Goddard, Vol. 17: 390-439.
- Wolfart, H. Christoph and Freda Ahenakew (1998). The Student's Dictionary of Literary Plains Cree, Based on Contemporary Texts. Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics Memoirs 15. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Linguistics Department. ISBN 0-921064-15-2.
[edit] External links
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