Chippewa [ciw] Dictionary and Archive

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

The Ojibwe language, Anishinaabemowin, is an endangered language, one renowned for the internal complexity of its verbs and nouns. The ancestral language of the Anishinaabe people, known in English as the Ojibwe or Chippewa, it is spoken by elders across the Western Great Lakes states and the adjacent areas of Canada. An increasing number of younger tribal members are now learning the language in a variety of educational settings such as immersion preschools, K-12, tribal colleges, and universities. Through this project, fluent elders and University of Minnesota scholars will provide the Anishinaabe Nation with some of the tools needed in its ongoing efforts to maintain and teach the language: a comprehensive bilingual reference dictionary of 40,000 words and a responsive on-line digital dictionary which will let users select and organize language information the way they want to see and hear it. The actual voices of the contributing elders will provide authoritative models of correct pronunciation and word usage. Writing the words in the most widely used spelling system, each dictionary will give access not only to the basic word stems, but also to sample inflected forms, breakdowns of the words into smaller meaningful parts such as prefixes and suffixes, and sentence examples of how the words are used. The project's recorded language documentation will be archived for use by future Anishinaabe community and scholarly researchers.