Atsina, or Gros Ventre (also known as ''Ananin, Ahahnelin, Ahe,'' ''A’ani, and ʔɔʔɔɔɔniiih''), was the ancestral language of the

Gros Ventre The Gros Ventre ( , ; meaning "big belly"), also known as the Aaniiih, A'aninin, Haaninin, Atsina, and White Clay, are a historically Algonquian-speaking Native American tribe located in north central Montana. Today the Gros Ventre people are ...

people of

Montana Montana () is a state in the Mountain West division of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North Dakota and South Dakota to the east, Wyoming to the south, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbi ...

. The last fluent speaker died in 2007, though revitalization efforts are underway.

History

Atsina is the name applied by specialists in Algonquian linguistics.

Arapaho The Arapaho (; french: Arapahos, ) are a Native American people historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota and Dakota. By the 1850s, Arapaho band ...

and Atsina are dialects of a common language usually designated by scholars as "Arapaho-Atsina". Historically, this language had five dialects, and on occasion specialists add a third dialect name to the label, resulting in the designation, "Arapaho-Atsina-Nawathinehena". Compared with Arapaho proper, Gros Ventre had three additional phonemes , , , and , and lacked the velar fricative .

Theresa Lamebull Theresa Elizabeth (Chandler) White Weasel Walker Lamebull (April 19, 1896? – August 10, 2007) was reputedly a supercentenarian believed to have been the oldest living member of the Gros Ventres, Gros Ventre Tribe of Montana and possibly the ...

taught the language at Fort Belknap College (now

Aaniiih Nakoda College Aaniiih Nakoda College (ANC, formerly Fort Belknap College) is a public tribal land-grant community college on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Harlem, Montana. The institution incorporates native culture into the curriculum and promotes c ...

), and helped develop a dictionary using the

Phraselator The Phraselator is a weatherproof handheld language translation device developed by Applied Data Systems and VoxTec, a former division of the military contractor Marine Acoustics, located in Annapolis, Maryland, USA. It was designed to serve as a ...

when she was 109. As of 2012, the White Clay Immersion School at Aaniiih Nakoda College was teaching the language to 26 students, up from 11 students in 2006.

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Notes

References

External links

Native Languages of the Americas: Gros Ventre (Ahe, Ahahnelin, Aane, Atsina)

Fort Belknap College
Gros Ventre Dictionary

OLAC Record entry for Gros Ventre
Gros Ventre Plains Algonquian languages Indigenous languages of the North American Plains Indigenous languages of Montana Endangered Algic languages Endangered languages of the United States Native American language revitalization Endangered indigenous languages of the Americas {{indigenousAmerican-lang-stub