Potawatomi (, also spelled Pottawatomie; in Potawatomi Bodwéwadmimwen, or Bodwéwadmi Zheshmowen, or Neshnabémwen) is a

Central Central is an adjective usually referring to being in the center of some place or (mathematical) object. Central may also refer to: Directions and generalised locations * Central Africa, a region in the centre of Africa continent, also known as ...

Algonquian language. It was historically spoken by the Pottawatomi people who lived around the

Great Lakes The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes in the mid-east region of North America that connect to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River. There are five lakes ...

in what are now

Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and the ...

and

Wisconsin Wisconsin () is a state in the upper Midwestern United States. Wisconsin is the 25th-largest state by total area and the 20th-most populous. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake M ...

in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, and in southern

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

. Federally recognized tribes in Michigan and Oklahoma are working to revive the language.

Language revitalization

Cecilia Miksekwe Jackson, one of the last surviving native speakers of Potawatomi, died in May 2011, at the age of 88. She was known for working to preserve and teach the language. Donald Neaseno Perrot, a native speaker who grew up in the Powers Bluff, Wisconsin area, has a series of Potawatomi videos, a website, and books available to preserve the language The federally recognized Pokégnek Bodéwadmik Pokagon Band of Potawatomi started a master-apprentice program in which a "language student (the language apprentice) will be paired with fluent Potawatomi speakers (the language masters)" in January 2013. In addition, classes in the Potowatomi language are available, including those at the Hannahville summer immersion camp, with webcast instruction and videoconferencing. There is also a free online language course from the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi on

Mango Languages Mango Languages is an American online language-learning website and mobile app based in Farmington Hills, Michigan for academic institutions, libraries, corporations, government agencies, and individuals. History Jason Teshuba, Mike Teshuba, ...

Classification

Potawatomi is a member of the

Algonquian language family The Algonquian languages ( or ; also Algonkian) are a subfamily of indigenous American languages that include most languages in the Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from the orthographically simi ...

(itself a member of the larger Algic stock). It is usually classified as a Central Algonquian language, with languages such as

Ojibwe The Ojibwe, Ojibwa, Chippewa, or Saulteaux are an Anishinaabe people in what is currently southern Canada, the northern Midwestern United States, and Northern Plains. According to the U.S. census, in the United States Ojibwe people are one of ...

Cree The Cree ( cr, néhinaw, script=Latn, , etc.; french: link=no, Cri) are a Indigenous peoples of the Americas, North American Indigenous people. They live primarily in Canada, where they form one of the country's largest First Nations in Canada ...

Menominee The Menominee (; mez, omǣqnomenēwak meaning ''"Menominee People"'', also spelled Menomini, derived from the Ojibwe language word for "Wild Rice People"; known as ''Mamaceqtaw'', "the people", in the Menominee language) are a federally recog ...

Miami-Illinois Miami-Illinois (endonym: , ) also known as Irenwa, or Irenwe is an indigenous Algonquian language spoken in the United States, primarily in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, western Ohio and adjacent areas along the Mississippi River by the Miami a ...

Shawnee The Shawnee are an Algonquian-speaking indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands. In the 17th century they lived in Pennsylvania, and in the 18th century they were in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, with some bands in Kentucky a ...

and

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 ...

. The label "Central Algonquian" signifies a geographic grouping rather than the group of languages descended from a common ancestor language within the Algonquian family. Of the Central languages, Potawatomi is most similar to

, but it also has borrowed a considerable amount of vocabulary from the Sauk. Generally, in developments since

Indian Removal Indian removal was the United States government policy of forced displacement of self-governing tribes of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi Riverspecifically, to a de ...

in the 19th century, Potawatomi has become differentiated in North America among separated populations. It is divided between Northern Potawatomi, spoken in Ontario, Canada; and Michigan and Wisconsin of the United States; and Southern Potawatomi, which is spoken in Kansas and Oklahoma, where certain Pottawatomi ancestors were removed who had formerly lived in Illinois and other areas east of the

Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it f ...

Writing systems

Current writing system

Though no standard orthography has been agreed upon by the Potawatomi communities, the system most commonly used is the "Pedagogical System" developed by the Wisconsin Native American Languages Program (WNALP). As the name suggests, it was designed to be used in language teaching. The system is based on the

Roman alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

and is phonemic, with each letter or digraph representing a contrastive sound. The letters used are a b ch d e é g ' h i j k m n o p s sh t w y z zh. In Kansas, a different system called BWAKA is used. It too is both based on the Roman alphabet and phonemic, with each letter or digraph representing a contrastive sound. The letters used are ' a b c d e e' g h i I j k m n o p s sh t u w y z zh.

Traditional system

The traditional system used in writing Potawatomi is a form of syllabic writing. Potawatomi,

Ottawa Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core ...

, Sac,

and Winnebago communities all used it. Derived from the Roman alphabet, it resembles handwritten Roman text. However, unlike the Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics or the

Cherokee alphabet The Cherokee syllabary is a syllabary invented by Sequoyah in the late 1810s and early 1820s to write the Cherokee language. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy as he was illiterate until the creation of his syllabary. He f ...

, it has not yet been incorporated into the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

standards. Each Potawatomi syllabic block in the system has at least 2 of the 17 alphabetic letters, which consist of 13 consonants and 4 vowels. Of the 13 phonemic consonantal letters, the /h/, written , is optional.

Phonology

Here, the phonology of the Northern dialect is described, which differs somewhat from that of the Southern dialect, spoken in Kansas. There are 5 vowel

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

s, 4

diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...

s, and 19 consonant phonemes. , which is often written as , represents an open-mid front unrounded vowel, . represents the

schwa In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it rep ...

, , which has several

allophonic In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...

variants. Before /n/, it becomes ; before /k/, , and word-finally, it becomes . is pronounced /u/ in Michigan and /o/ elsewhere. When it is in a closed syllable, it is pronounced . There are also four diphthongs, , spelled . Phonemic are realized as .

Obstruent An obstruent () is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well as ...

s, as in many other Algonquian languages, do not have a voicing distinction ''per se'' but what is better termed a "strong"/"weak" distinction. "Strong" consonants, written as

voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies v ...

(), are always voiceless, often aspirated, and longer in duration than the "weak" consonants, which are written as

voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer ...

() and are often voiced and are not aspirated.

Nasals In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majorit ...

before another consonant become

syllabic Syllabic may refer to: *Syllable, a unit of speech sound, considered the building block of words **Syllabic consonant, a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable *Syllabary, writing system using symbols for syllables *Abugida, writing system ...

, and /t/, /d/, and /n/ are dental: .

Vowels

Consonants

Lenis type consonants can frequently be voiced in various surroundings as d dʒ ɡ ɡʷfor plosives and affricates, and ʒfor fricatives.

Morphology

Potawatomi has six parts of speech: noun, verb, pronoun, prenoun, preverb, and particle.Buszard-Welcher, L. (2003)
Constructional Polysemy and Mental Spaces in Potawatomi Discourse
. PhD Thesis, U.C. Berkeley

Pronouns

There are two main types of pronoun: personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns. As nouns and verbs use inflection to describe

anaphoric reference In linguistics, deixis (, ) is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words ''tomorrow'', ''there'', and ''they''. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their de ...

, the main use of the free pronouns is for emphasis.

Personal pronouns

Personal pronouns, because of vowel syncope, resemble those of

Odaawaa The Odawa (also Ottawa or Odaawaa ), said to mean "traders", are an Indigenous American ethnic group who primarily inhabit land in the Eastern Woodlands region, commonly known as the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. They ha ...

but structurally resemble more to those in the

Swampy Cree language Swampy Cree (variously known as Maskekon, Omaškêkowak, and often anglicized as Omushkego) is a variety of the Algonquian language, Cree. It is spoken in a series of Swampy Cree communities in northern Manitoba, central northeast of Saskatchewa ...

Correspondences to Ojibwe

The relatively-recent split from Ojibwe makes Potawatomi still exhibit strong correspondences, especifically with the ''Odaawaa'' (Ottawa) dialect.

Notes

External links

Potawatomi Language Vocabulary, Audio and Video, Interactive Language Games, Online CoursesThe Neshnabe Institute for Cultural Studies - Dedicated to Potawatomi Language Revitalization
Smokey McKinney, 1997
Prairie Band Potawatomi Language DepartmentCitizen Potawatomi Department of LanguageHannahville Indian Community Department of Culture, Language and HistoryForest County Potawatomi Cultural Center, Library and Museum
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20140301070810/http://beta.pokagonband-nsn.gov/departments/language-and-culture/potawatomi-language-programs Pokégnek Bodéwadmik Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Department of Language and Culture]
Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Potawatomi Department of Language and CultureOLAC resources in and about the Potawatomi languagePotawatomi Dictionary
, by the Citizen Potawatomi Nation {{authority control Central Algonquian languages Anishinaabe languages Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands First Nations languages in Canada Indigenous languages of Oklahoma Native American language revitalization