Anishinàbemiwin is a language very closely related to Ojibway, Odawa, and Oji-Cree; it could be considered to be the easternmost part of an Ojibway dialect chain stretching from the Rockies to western Quebec. The English term for this language is ‘Algonquin’, not to be confused with ‘Algonquian’ which is the linguistics label for the language family.

There are three major dialects of the language as described by Valentine (1994): Northern, Western, and Nipissing Algonquian, see the following maps for details: Ontario, Québec.

There are several community based orthographies which are outlined below.

Note: There are several Roman Orthography conventions on this site that may require further explanation. On the charts below, there is lots of phonetic terminology that may not be familiar to everyone.

Nipissing-Algonquin Orthography: Consonants

Vowels

• The voiceless and voiced consonants in the table above could also be labelled phonologically as fortis (strong) and lenis (weak) respectively. In many dialects, the voiceless consonants are more heavily aspirated (with a strong [h] sound afterwards) than in English. At the end of a word, the voiceless and voiced sounds coalesce to varying degrees.
• The vowel /e/ is always long—there is no short /e/—so the orthography does not require it to be accented. The other long vowels take the gràve accent.
• Hyphens may be used to separate some prefixes/preverbs from verbs.

• For most writers, long vowels are not distinguished from short vowels. A similar situation exists for voiceless and voiced stops.

Last Update: August 20, 2008