Algonquian is one of the largest indigenous language families of North America, with member languages historically spoken across a broad area from the Atlantic coast of Canada and the United States west to the Rocky Mountains. Its members include Ojibwe, Cree and Blackfoot, and it gave English loanwords such as moose, moccasin and toboggan.
Facts
Partially Attested
Speaker CountConfirmed: Cree, generally considered the most widely spoken Algonquian language, had approximately 96,000 mother-tongue speakers in Canada per the cited source, with a further approximately 65,000 reported as the language most often spoken at home. Open: no combined total across all Algonquian languages (Ojibwe, Blackfoot, Mi'kmaq, and others) was found in this source. RegionEastern and central North America, from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains 1 Proto-Language StatusProto-Algonquian is reconstructed via the comparative method and is estimated to have been spoken around 2,500 to 3,000 years ago; there is no scholarly consensus on where the proto-language homeland was located. 1 Connections
Associated With
His early fieldwork and dissertation research on Potawatomi, an Algonquian language, grounded the structuralist methods he later generalized in his design-features theory of language.
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Algonquian Languages
Wikimedia FoundationLead section, second paragraphQuote, Lead section, second paragraph
The proto-language from which all of the languages of the family descend, Proto-Algonquian, was spoken around 2,500 to 3,000 years ago. There is no scholarly consensus about where this language was spoken.
2. Wikipedia: Cree
Wikimedia FoundationMother tongue speakers sentenceQuote, Mother tongue speakers sentence
the mother tongue (i.e. language first learned and still understood) of approximately 96,000 people, and the language most often spoken at home of about 65,000 people across Canada
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