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Menominee language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Menominee Omāēqnomenew |
||
|---|---|---|
| Pronunciation: | [omæːʔnomenew] | |
| Spoken in: | United States | |
| Region: | Northeastern Wisconsin | |
| Total speakers: | 39 | |
| Language family: | Algic Algonquian Menominee |
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | alg | |
| ISO 639-3: | mez | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
The Menominee language (also spelled Menomini) is an Algonquian language spoken on the Menominee Nation lands in Northern Wisconsin in the United States.
Menominee is a highly endangered language, with only a handful of elderly speakers left. According to a 1997 report by the Menominee Historic Preservation Office, 39 people speak Menominee as their first language, 26 as their second language, and 65 others have learned some of it for the purpose of understanding the language and/or teaching it to others.
The main characteristics of Menominee, as compared to other Algonquian languages, are its heavy use of the low front vowel /æ/, its rich negation morphology, and its lexicon. Some scholars (notably Bloomfield and Sapir) have classified it as a Central Algonquian language based on its phonology.
The name of the tribe, and the language, Omāēqnomenew, comes from the word for wild rice, which was a staple of this tribe's diet for millennia. This designation for them (as Omanoominii) is also used by the Anishinaabe (Ojibwa), their Algonquian neighbors to the north.
For good sources of information on both the Menominee and their language, some valuable resources include Leonard Bloomfield's 1928 bilingual text collection, his 1962 grammar (a landmark in its own right), and Skinner's earlier anthropological work.
The phonology of Menominee is (with the transcription of some phonemes to their right; long vowels are generally written with a macron or diaresis):[1]
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | p | t | k | ʔ — <q> | |
| Affricate | ʧ — <c> | ||||
| Fricative | s~ʃ — <s> | h | |||
| Nasal | m | n | |||
| Semivowel | w | j — <y> | |||
| Front | Central | Back | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Short | Long | Short | Long | Short | Long | |
| Close | i | iː | u | uː | ||
| Close-Mid | e | eː | o | oː | ||
| Near-open | æ — <ae> | æː — <āē> | ||||
| Open | a | aː | ||||