Language
The Ojibwe language is known as Anishinaabemowin or Ojibwemowin, and is still widely spoken, but the number of fluent speakers has declined sharply. Today, most of the language's fluent speakers are elders. A movement has picked up in recent years to revitalize the language, and restore its strength as an anchor of Ojibwe culture. The language belongs to the Algonquian linguistic group, and is descended from Proto-Algonquian. Its sister languages include Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Cree, Fox, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Shawnee. Anishinaabemowin is frequently referred to as a "Central Algonquian" language; however, Central Algonquian is an area grouping rather than a linguistic genetic one. Ojibwemowin is the fourth-most spoken Native language in North America (US and Canada) after Navajo, Cree, and Inuktitut. Many decades of fur trading with the French established the language as one of the key trade languages of the Great Lakes and the northern Great Plains.
The popularity of the epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1855, publicized the Ojibwe culture. The epic contains many toponyms that originate from Ojibwe words.
Read more about this topic: Ojibwe People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“We find that the child who does not yet have language at his command, the child under two and a half, will be able to cooperate with our education if we go easy on the “blocking” techniques, the outright prohibitions, the “no’s” and go heavy on “substitution” techniques, that is, the redirection or certain impulses and the offering of substitute satisfactions.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Please stop using the word “Negro.”... We are the only human beings in the world with fifty-seven variety of complexions who are classed together as a single racial unit. Therefore, we are really truly colored people, and that is the only name in the English language which accurately describes us.”
—Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)