Ebook: Ojibwe Language Shift 1600-present

Publisher: Language Spread Conference - Leipzig
Publication date: 2006
ISBN: N.A.
Number of pages: 18In much of the study of the phenomenon of language spread the focus has been on attempting to explain the distribution of languages at a particular attested time in history based on events in the remote and largely historically unattested past based on inferences from archeological data alone.i In recent work the present author and Johanna Nichols have been developing a broad-based approach to explaining language distribution by focusing first on language spreads attested within the historical period to inform our theorizing about spreads that took place in pre-history. One of our examples focuses on the various indigenous Algonquian speaking hunter-gatherer groups living in the general region of the Great Lakes of North America. In this paper I will review how some of these groups have moved, expanded, and contracted into their present distribution over the last 500 years. I will show that every logically possible type of language spread is attested in this area, all but one involving only hunter-gatherers. In this area we find migration into unoccupied territory, migration with one population replacing another, and then a number of spreads with intermingling populations both with migrators switching to the local language, and with migrators language supplanting the local language, and finally there are instances of languages moving without migration, i.e., language shift.

Map 1: Detail of language distribution in the Great Lakes area according to HNAI -Handbook of North American Indians- volume 17 (Goddard, 1996)
Map II: Approximate distribution of the western Great Lakes tribes ca. 1650 (Hamilton [1985])
Map III: Approximate distribution of languages around the Great Lakes ca. 1650 (following Hamilton [1985])
Map IV: Approximate distribution of languages around the Great Lakes ca. 1750 (after Tanner [1987] and Ray [1974])
Map V: Approximate distribution of Ojibwe and Cree ca. 1980
Map VI: Approximate distribution of Ojibwe dialects ca. 1980 (after Denny [1992] based on work ultimately published in Valentine [1994])
Figure I. Baraga: A dictioanry of the Otchibwe language explained in English
Figure II: The Ojibwe sub-family