Michif language
Encyclopedia
Michif is the language
of the Métis people of Canada
and the United States, who are the descendants of First Nations
women (mainly Cree
, Nakota
and Ojibwe) and fur trade
workers of European ancestry (mainly French Canadian
s and Scottish Canadians). Nowadays Michif is spoken in scattered Métis communities in the provinces of Saskatchewan
and Manitoba
in Canada and in North Dakota
in the U.S. There are some 230 speakers of Mitchif in the United States (down from 390 at the 1990 census ), most of whom live in North Dakota, particularly in the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation
. Michif emerged in the early 19th century as a mixed language
(not to be confused with a creole
), and adopted a consistent character between about 1820 and 1840.
Michif combines Cree
and Métis French
(Rhodes 1977, Bakker 1997:85), a variety of Canadian French
, with some additional borrowing from English
and First Nation languages such as Ojibwe
and Assiniboine
. In general, Michif noun phrase
phonology
, lexicon
, morphology
, and syntax
are derived from Métis French, while verb phrase
phonology, lexicon, morphology, and syntax are from a southern variety of Plains Cree. (Plains Cree is a western dialect of Cree.) Articles and adjectives are also of Métis French origin, but demonstratives are from Plains Cree.
The Michif language is unusual (and possibly even unique) among mixed language
s, in that rather than forming a simplified grammar, it developed by incorporating complex elements of the chief languages from which it was born. French-origin noun phrases retain lexical gender
and adjective agreement; Cree-origin verbs retain much of their polysynthetic
structure. This suggests that instead of haltingly using words from another's tongue, the people who gradually came to speak Michif were fully fluent in both French and Cree.
The number of speakers is estimated at fewer than 1,000; it was probably double or triple this number at the close of the 19th century, but never much higher.
stops such as /ʰt/ and /ʰk/ exist only in Cree words. In this variety of Michif, the French elements were pronounced in ways that have distinctively Canadian French values for the vowels, while the Cree elements have distinctively Cree values for vowels. Nonetheless, there is some Cree influence on French words in the stress system (Rosen 2006). But by the year 2000 there were Michif speakers who had collapsed the two systems into a single system (Rosen 2007).
Cree-origin demonstratives can be added to noun phrases, in which case the Cree gender (animate or inanimate) is that of the corresponding Cree noun.
Adjectives are French-origin (Cree has no adjectives), and as in French they are either pre- or postnominal. Prenominal adjectives agree in gender (like French), however, postnominal adjectives do not agree in gender (unlike French).
Verbs: 88-99% Cree-origin
Question words: Cree-origin
Personal pronouns: Cree
Postpositions: Cree-origin
Prepositions: French-origin
Conjunctions: 55% Cree-origin; 40% French-origin
Numerals: French-origin
Demonstratives: Cree-origin
The Lord's Prayer in English, French, and Michif:
In Cree, verbs can be very complex with up to twenty morphemes, incorporated nouns and unclear boundaries between morphemes. In other words, in Cree verbs it is very difficult to separate grammar from lexicon. As a result, in Michif the grammatical and bound elements are almost all Cree, and the lexical and free elements are almost all French; verbs are almost totally Cree, because the verb consists of grammatical and bound elements.
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
of the Métis people of Canada
Métis people (Canada)
The Métis are one of the Aboriginal peoples in Canada who trace their descent to mixed First Nations parentage. The term was historically a catch-all describing the offspring of any such union, but within generations the culture syncretised into what is today a distinct aboriginal group, with...
and the United States, who are the descendants of First Nations
First Nations
First Nations is a term that collectively refers to various Aboriginal peoples in Canada who are neither Inuit nor Métis. There are currently over 630 recognised First Nations governments or bands spread across Canada, roughly half of which are in the provinces of Ontario and British Columbia. The...
women (mainly Cree
Cree
The Cree are one of the largest groups of First Nations / Native Americans in North America, with 200,000 members living in Canada. In Canada, the major proportion of Cree live north and west of Lake Superior, in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and the Northwest Territories, although...
, Nakota
Nakota
The term Nakota is the endonym used by the native peoples of North America who usually go by the name of Assiniboine , in the United States, and of Stoney, in Canada....
and Ojibwe) and fur trade
Fur trade
The fur trade is a worldwide industry dealing in the acquisition and sale of animal fur. Since the establishment of world market for in the early modern period furs of boreal, polar and cold temperate mammalian animals have been the most valued...
workers of European ancestry (mainly French Canadian
French Canadian
French Canadian or Francophone Canadian, , generally refers to the descendents of French colonists who arrived in New France in the 17th and 18th centuries...
s and Scottish Canadians). Nowadays Michif is spoken in scattered Métis communities in the provinces of Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan is a prairie province in Canada, which has an area of . Saskatchewan is bordered on the west by Alberta, on the north by the Northwest Territories, on the east by Manitoba, and on the south by the U.S. states of Montana and North Dakota....
and Manitoba
Manitoba
Manitoba is a Canadian prairie province with an area of . The province has over 110,000 lakes and has a largely continental climate because of its flat topography. Agriculture, mostly concentrated in the fertile southern and western parts of the province, is vital to the province's economy; other...
in Canada and in North Dakota
North Dakota
North Dakota is a state located in the Midwestern region of the United States of America, along the Canadian border. The state is bordered by Canada to the north, Minnesota to the east, South Dakota to the south and Montana to the west. North Dakota is the 19th-largest state by area in the U.S....
in the U.S. There are some 230 speakers of Mitchif in the United States (down from 390 at the 1990 census ), most of whom live in North Dakota, particularly in the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation
Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation
Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation is an Indian Reservation located primarily in northern North Dakota. It is the land-base for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians ....
. Michif emerged in the early 19th century as a mixed language
Mixed language
A mixed language is a language that arises through the fusion of two source languages, normally in situations of thorough bilingualism, so that it is not possible to classify the resulting language as belonging to either of the language families that were its source...
(not to be confused with a creole
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
), and adopted a consistent character between about 1820 and 1840.
Michif combines Cree
Cree language
Cree is an Algonquian language spoken by approximately 117,000 people across Canada, from the Northwest Territories and Alberta to Labrador, making it the aboriginal language with the highest number of speakers in Canada. It is also spoken in the U.S. state of Montana...
and Métis French
Métis French
Métis French, along with Michif and Bungi, is one of the traditional languages of the Métis people, and the French-dialect source of Michif.-Michif:...
(Rhodes 1977, Bakker 1997:85), a variety of Canadian French
Canadian French
Canadian French is an umbrella term referring to the varieties of French spoken in Canada. French is the mother tongue of nearly seven million Canadians, a figure constituting roughly 22% of the national population. At the federal level it has co-official status alongside English...
, with some additional borrowing from English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and First Nation languages such as Ojibwe
Ojibwe language
Ojibwe , also called Anishinaabemowin, is an indigenous language of the Algonquian language family. Ojibwe is characterized by a series of dialects that have local names and frequently local writing systems...
and Assiniboine
Assiniboine language
The Assiniboine language is a Nakotan Siouan language of the Northern Plains, spoken by around 200 Assiniboine people, most of them elderly. The name Asiniibwaan is an Ojibwe term meaning "Stone Siouans"...
. In general, Michif noun phrase
Noun phrase
In grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....
phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
, lexicon
Lexicon
In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...
, morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
, and syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
are derived from Métis French, while verb phrase
Verb phrase
In linguistics, a verb phrase or VP is a syntactic unit composed of at least one verb and the dependents of that verb. One can distinguish between two types of VPs, finite VPs and non-finite VPs . While phrase structure grammars acknowledge both, dependency grammars reject the existence of a...
phonology, lexicon, morphology, and syntax are from a southern variety of Plains Cree. (Plains Cree is a western dialect of Cree.) Articles and adjectives are also of Métis French origin, but demonstratives are from Plains Cree.
The Michif language is unusual (and possibly even unique) among mixed language
Mixed language
A mixed language is a language that arises through the fusion of two source languages, normally in situations of thorough bilingualism, so that it is not possible to classify the resulting language as belonging to either of the language families that were its source...
s, in that rather than forming a simplified grammar, it developed by incorporating complex elements of the chief languages from which it was born. French-origin noun phrases retain lexical gender
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
and adjective agreement; Cree-origin verbs retain much of their polysynthetic
Polysynthetic language
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have extremely high morpheme-to-word ratios.Not all languages can be...
structure. This suggests that instead of haltingly using words from another's tongue, the people who gradually came to speak Michif were fully fluent in both French and Cree.
The number of speakers is estimated at fewer than 1,000; it was probably double or triple this number at the close of the 19th century, but never much higher.
Phonology
Michif as recorded starting in the 1970s combined two separate phonological systems: one for French origin elements, and one for Cree origin elements (Rhodes 1977, 1986). For instance, /y/, /l/, /r/ and /f/ exist only in French words, whereas preaspiratedPreaspiration
In phonetics, preaspiration is a period of voicelessness or aspiration preceding the closure of a voiceless obstruent, basically equivalent to an -like sound preceding the obstruent. In other words, when an obstruent is preaspirated, the glottis is opened for some time before the obstruent closure...
stops such as /ʰt/ and /ʰk/ exist only in Cree words. In this variety of Michif, the French elements were pronounced in ways that have distinctively Canadian French values for the vowels, while the Cree elements have distinctively Cree values for vowels. Nonetheless, there is some Cree influence on French words in the stress system (Rosen 2006). But by the year 2000 there were Michif speakers who had collapsed the two systems into a single system (Rosen 2007).
Vocabulary
A comparison of some common words in French, Cree, and Michif:| English | French | Michif | Cree |
| One | Un | Haen, Peeyak | Pêyak |
| Two | Deux | Deu | Nîso |
| Three | Trois | Trwaa | Nisto |
| Four | Quatre | Kaet | Nêwo |
| Five | Cinq | Saenk | Nîyânan |
| Man | Homme (L'homme) | Lom | Nâpêw |
| Dog | Chien | Shyaeñ, Shyen | Atim |
| Sun | Soleil | Saley | Pîsim |
| Water | Eau (De l'eau) | Dilo | Nipîy |
| White | Blanc | Blañ | Wâpiskâw |
| Yellow | Jaune | Zhun | Osâwâw |
| Red | Rouge | Ruzh | Mihkwâw |
| Black | Noir | Nwer | Kaskitêwâw |
| Eat | Manger | Miichishow; Miitshow | Mîcisiw |
| See | Voir | Waapow | Wâpiw |
| Hear | Entendre | Peehtam | Pêhtam |
| Sing | Chanter | Nakamow | Nikamôw |
| Leave | Partir | Shipweeteew; Atishipweeteew | Sipwêtêw |
Noun phrase
Nouns are almost always accompanied by a French-origin determiner or a possessive.| English | Français | Michif |
| a gun / | un fusil /œ̃ fyzi/ | aeñ fiizii |
| a house | une maison /yn mɛzɔ̃/ | aen meezoñ |
| the boy | le garçon /lə ɡarsɔ̃/ | li garsoñ |
| the rock | la roche /la rɔʃ/ | la rosh |
| the knives | les couteaux /le kuto/ | lii kutu |
| his (her) food | son manger / | su mañzhii |
| his (her) hand | sa main /sa mɛ̃/ | sa maeñ |
| my dogs | mes chiens /me ʃjɛ̃/ | mii shyaeñ |
Cree-origin demonstratives can be added to noun phrases, in which case the Cree gender (animate or inanimate) is that of the corresponding Cree noun.
| English | Français | Michif | Plains Cree |
| that boy | ce garçon-là | awa li garsoñ | awa nâpêsis (animate) |
| this egg | cet oeuf-là | ôma li zaef | ôma wâwi (inanimate) |
| that rock | cette roche-là | awa la rosh | awa asinîy (animate) |
| those men | ces hommes-là | neekik lii zom | neekik nâpêwak (animate) |
Adjectives are French-origin (Cree has no adjectives), and as in French they are either pre- or postnominal. Prenominal adjectives agree in gender (like French), however, postnominal adjectives do not agree in gender (unlike French).
Verb phrase
The verb phrase is that of Plains Cree-origin with little reduction (there are no dubitative or preterit verb forms).Word order
Michif word order is basically that of Cree (relatively free). However, the more French-origin elements are used, the closer the syntax seems to conform to norms of spoken French.Lexicon
Nouns: 83-94% French-origin; Cree-origin or Ojibwe-origin, English-originVerbs: 88-99% Cree-origin
Question words: Cree-origin
Personal pronouns: Cree
Postpositions: Cree-origin
Prepositions: French-origin
Conjunctions: 55% Cree-origin; 40% French-origin
Numerals: French-origin
Demonstratives: Cree-origin
The Lord's Prayer in English, French, and Michif:
| Michif | French | English |
|---|---|---|
| Toñ Periinaan | Notre Père | Our Father |
| Toñ Periinaan, dañ li syel kayaayeen kiichitwaawan toñ noo. Kiiya kaaniikaanishtaman peetoteiie kaandaweetaman taatochiikateew ota dañ la ter taapishkoch dañ li syel. Miinaan anoch moñ paeñiinaan poneeiiminaan kamachitotamaak, niishtanaan nkaponeemaanaanik anikee kaakiimaiitotaakoyaakuk kayakochii'inaan, maaka pashpii'inaan aayik ochi maachiishiiweepishiwin. Kaaniikaaniishtamawiiaak, kishokishiiwin, kaakichiteemiiak kiiya aniie, anoch ekwa takiine. Answichil. |
Notre Père, qui est aux cieux, Que ton nom soit sanctifié, Que ton règne vienne, Que ta volonté soit faite Sur la terre comme au ciel. Donne-nous aujourd’hui notre pain de ce jour Pardonne-nous nos offenses, Comme nous pardonnons aussi à ceux qui nous ont offensés, Et ne nous soumets pas à la tentation, Mais délivre-nous du mal.[Car c'est à toi qu'appartiennent le règne, la puissance et la gloire pour les siècles des siècles.] Amen. | Our Father, which art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done, in earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us And lead us not into temptation; But deliver us from evil.[For thine is the kingdom, The power, and the glory, For ever and ever.] Amen. |
Language genesis
In languages of mixed ethnicities, the language of the mother usually provides the grammatical system, while the language of the father provides the lexicon. The reasons are as follows: children tend to know their mother’s language better; men are often immigrant, whereas women are native to the region. If the bilingual children need to use either of their parents’ languages to converse with outsiders, it is most likely to be the language of their mothers. Thus, the model of language-mixing predicts that Michif should have a Cree grammatical system and French lexicon. However, in reality, Michif has Cree verb phrases and French noun phrases. The explanation for this unusual distribution of Cree and French elements in Michif lies in the polysynthetic nature of Cree morphology.In Cree, verbs can be very complex with up to twenty morphemes, incorporated nouns and unclear boundaries between morphemes. In other words, in Cree verbs it is very difficult to separate grammar from lexicon. As a result, in Michif the grammatical and bound elements are almost all Cree, and the lexical and free elements are almost all French; verbs are almost totally Cree, because the verb consists of grammatical and bound elements.
See also
- Métis people
- Métis FrenchMétis FrenchMétis French, along with Michif and Bungi, is one of the traditional languages of the Métis people, and the French-dialect source of Michif.-Michif:...
- Cree languageCree languageCree is an Algonquian language spoken by approximately 117,000 people across Canada, from the Northwest Territories and Alberta to Labrador, making it the aboriginal language with the highest number of speakers in Canada. It is also spoken in the U.S. state of Montana...
- Canadian FrenchCanadian FrenchCanadian French is an umbrella term referring to the varieties of French spoken in Canada. French is the mother tongue of nearly seven million Canadians, a figure constituting roughly 22% of the national population. At the federal level it has co-official status alongside English...
- Bungee languageBungee languageBungi is a creole of Scottish English strongly influenced by Orcadian, Gaelic, Cree and Ojibwe, and spoken by the Red River Métis in present-day Manitoba, Canada...
- Chinook JargonChinook JargonChinook Jargon originated as a pidgin trade language of the Pacific Northwest, and spread during the 19th century from the lower Columbia River, first to other areas in modern Oregon and Washington, then British Columbia and as far as Alaska, sometimes taking on characteristics of a creole language...
- Journal of Indigenous StudiesJournal of Indigenous StudiesThe Journal of Indigenous Studies was a multilingual, biannual, peer-reviewed academic journal. It was established in 1989 and was sponsored by the Gabriel Dumont Institute, a Métis-directed educational and cultural entity in Saskatoon , affiliated with the University of Regina...
- List of languages
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