Fox (known by a variety of different names, including Mesquakie (Meskwaki), Mesquakie-Sauk, Mesquakie-Sauk-Kickapoo, Sauk-Fox, and Sac and Fox) is an Algonquian language, spoken by a thousand

Meskwaki The Meskwaki (sometimes spelled Mesquaki), also known by the European exonyms Fox Indians or the Fox, are a Native American people. They have been closely linked to the Sauk people of the same language family. In the Meskwaki language, th ...

, Sauk, and Kickapoo in various locations in the

Midwestern United States The Midwestern United States, also referred to as the Midwest or the American Midwest, is one of four census regions of the United States Census Bureau (also known as "Region 2"). It occupies the northern central part of the United States. I ...

and in

northern Mexico Northern Mexico ( es, el Norte de México ), commonly referred as , is an informal term for the northern cultural and geographical area in Mexico. Depending on the source, it contains some or all of the states of Baja California, Baja California ...

Dialects

The three distinct dialects are: *

Fox Foxes are small to medium-sized, omnivorous mammals belonging to several genera of the family Canidae. They have a flattened skull, upright, triangular ears, a pointed, slightly upturned snout, and a long bushy tail (or ''brush''). Twelve sp ...

or'' Meskwakiatoweni ''(Meskwaki language) (also called Mesquakie, Meskwaki) * Sauk or ''Thâkiwâtowêweni'' (Thâkîwaki language) (also rendered Sac), and * Kickapoo (also rendered ''Kikapú''; considered by some to be a closely related but distinct language). If Kickapoo is counted as a separate language rather than a dialect of Fox, then only between 200 and 300 speakers of Fox remain. Extinct Mascouten was most likely another dialect, though it is scarcely attested.

Revitalization

Most speakers are elderly or middle-aged, making it highly

endangered An endangered species is a species that is very likely to become extinct in the near future, either worldwide or in a particular political jurisdiction. Endangered species may be at risk due to factors such as habitat loss, poaching and inva ...

. The tribal school at the

Meskwaki Settlement The Meskwaki Settlement is an unincorporated community in Tama County, Iowa, United States, west of Tama. It encompasses the reservation lands of the Meskwaki Nation (federally recognized as the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa), on ...

in Iowa incorporates bilingual education for children. In 2011, the Meskwaki Sewing Project was created, to bring mothers and girls together "with elder women in the Meskwaki Senior Center sewing traditional clothing and learning the Meskwaki language." Prominent scholars doing research on the language include

Ives Goddard Robert Hale Ives Goddard III (born 1941) is a linguist and a curator emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. He is widely considered the leading expert on the Algonqui ...

and

Lucy Thomason Lucy is an English feminine given name derived from the Latin masculine given name Lucius with the meaning ''as of light'' (''born at dawn or daylight'', maybe also ''shiny'', or ''of light complexion''). Alternative spellings are Luci, Luce, Luc ...

of the Smithsonian Institution and

Amy Dahlstrom Amy is a female given name, sometimes short for Amanda, Amelia, Amélie, or Amita. In French, the name is spelled ''"Aimée"''. People A–E * Amy Acker (born 1976), American actress * Amy Vera Ackman, also known as Mother Giovanni (1886–1 ...

of the University of Chicago.

Phonology

The consonant phonemes of Fox are given in the table below. The eight vowel phonemes are: short and long . Other than those involving a consonant plus or , the only possible consonant cluster is . Until the early 1900s, Fox was a phonologically very conservative language and preserved many features of

Proto-Algonquian Proto-Algonquian (commonly abbreviated PA) is the proto-language from which the various Algonquian languages are descended. It is generally estimated to have been spoken around 2,500 to 3,000 years ago, but there is less agreement on where it was ...

; records from the decades immediately following 1900 are particularly useful to Algonquianists for this reason. By the 1960s, however, an extensive progression of phonological changes had taken place, resulting in the loss of intervocalic semivowels and certain other features.

Grammar

Vocabulary

Mesquakie numerals are as follows:

Writing systems

Besides the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy ...

, Fox has been written in two indigenous scripts. "Fox I" is an

abugida An abugida (, from Ge'ez language, Ge'ez: ), sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental Writing systems#Segmental writing system, writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; ...

based on the cursive French alphabet (see

Great Lakes Algonquian syllabics Great Lakes Algonquian syllabics (or Great Lakes Aboriginal syllabics,Walker, Willard, 1996; Goddard, Ives, 1996 also referred to as "Western Great Lakes Syllabary" by Campbell) is a writing system for several Algonquian languages that emerged du ...

). Consonants written by themselves are understood to be syllables containing the vowel /a/. They are l /pa/, t /ta/, s /sa/, d /ša/, tt /ča/, I /ya/, w /wa/, m /ma/, n /na/, K /ka/, q /kwa/. The characters ''d'' for /š/, ''tt'' for /č/, and ''q'' for /kw/ derive from French ''ch, tch,'' and ''q(u)''. Vowels are written by adding dots to the consonant: l. /pe/, l· /pi/, l.. /po/. "Fox II" is a consonant–vowel alphabet, though according to Coulmas, /p/ is not written (as /a/ is not written in Fox I). Vowels (or /p/ plus a vowel) are written as cross-hatched tally marks, approximately × /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/. Consonants are (approximately) + /t/, C /s/, Q /š/, ı /č/, ñ /v/,Actually, like one script ''n'' stacked on another. ═ /y/, ƧƧ /w/, 田 /m/, # /n/, C′ /k/, ƧC /kw/.

References

*Bloomfield, Leonard. 1925. "Notes on the Fox Language." ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 3:219-32. *Cowan, William 1991. "Observations Regarding Fox (Mesquakie) Phonology". ''Papers of the Twenty-Second Algonquian Conference''. *Dahlstrom, Amy. (N.d.). ''Meskwaki Syntax (Manuscript)''. Retrieved from https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/adahlstrom/publications-2/selected-manuscripts/meskwaki-syntax-book *Voorhis, Paul H. 1974. ''Introduction to the Kickapoo Language'', Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

External links

Native Languages of the Americas: Mesquakie-SaukFox texts (1907), ed. William JonesThe Owl Sacred Pack of the Fox Indians (1921), ed. Truman MichelsonThe Autobiography of a Fox Indian Woman (1895), ed. Truman Michelson
*
OLAC resources in and about the Meskwaki languageOLAC resources in and about the Kickapoo languageA Concise Dictionary of the Sauk Language
, 2005, Gordon Whittaker, The Sac & Fox National Public Library, Stroud, Oklahoma {{Algonquian languages Algonquian languages Native American language revitalization Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands Indigenous languages of the North American Plains Indigenous languages of Oklahoma Endangered Algic languages Articles citing INALI Endangered indigenous languages of the Americas Kickapoo tribe