During the fur trade era, a

pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...

form of

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 ...

known as Broken Oghibbeway was used as a

trade language A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...

in the

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 ...

and

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 ...

valleys. Data on the language was collected during the 1820s at

Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin Prairie du Chien () is a city in and the county seat of Crawford County, Wisconsin, United States. The population was 5,506 at the 2020 census. Its ZIP Code is 53821. Often referred to as Wisconsin's second oldest city, Prairie du Chien was esta ...

by Edwin James, a physician and naturalist, who also gave the pidgin its name. It has been described as "…a language with a restricted vocabulary drawn from the Ottawa dialect of Ojibwe with a few words from the

Fox language 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, Sauk, and Kickapoo in various locations i ...

, another Algonquian language of the region, and restructured and reduced, but not absent, Ojibwe morphology."Nichols, John, 1995, p. 1. James recognized that Broken Oghibbeway was different from the variety of Ojibwe spoken in

Wisconsin Territory The Territory of Wisconsin was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that existed from July 3, 1836, until May 29, 1848, when an eastern portion of the territory was admitted to the Union as the State of Wisconsin. Belmont was ...

. He noted that it "…is of the dialect used by the traders and the people of mixed blood in speaking with the Menomonies and Winnebagoes also many of the

Sioux The Sioux or Oceti Sakowin (; Dakota language, Dakota: Help:IPA, /otʃʰeːtʰi ʃakoːwĩ/) are groups of Native Americans in the United States, Native American tribes and First Nations in Canada, First Nations peoples in North America. The ...

, Saxes and

Foxes 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 ...

Morphology

Although Broken Oghibbeway retains many aspects of the complex inflectional morphology that characterizes Ojibwe, it is nonetheless simplified and restructured, with reductions in the treatment of transitivity and

gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures u ...

, with simplification of the system of

personal Personal may refer to: Aspects of persons' respective individualities * Privacy * Personality * Personal, personal advertisement, variety of classified advertisement used to find romance or friendship Companies * Personal, Inc., a Washington, ...

prefixes used on verbs, loss of the negative suffix that occurs on verbs, and loss of inflectional suffixes that indicate grammatical objects. For example, in Ojibwe, the inverse marker is suffixed to the animate stem of the verb to express the present tense and a prefix is added to indicate the object of the sentence. However, in Broken Oghibbeway, the inanimate verb stem is used and the object of a sentence is expressed with an independent pronoun.

Animacy Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around th ...

distinctions for nouns were completely lost in Broken Oghibbeway, but are somewhat preserved for verbs: animate third person subjects are marked in the verb with the ''o-'' prefix, while inanimate subjects have no prefix.

References

{{reflist, 30em Anishinaabe languages North America Native-based pidgins and creoles Native American history of Wisconsin