Menominee language
| Menominee | |
|---|---|
| Omāēqnomenew | |
| Pronunciation | [omæːʔnomenew] |
| Native to | United States |
| Region | Northeastern Wisconsin |
| Ethnicity | 800 Menominee (2000 census) |
|
Native speakers
|
35 (2007) 25 L2 speakers (no date) |
|
Algic
|
|
| Official status | |
| Regulated by | Menominee Language & Culture Commission |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | meno1252 |
Menominee /mᵻˈnɒmᵻniː/ (also spelled Menomini) is an Algonquian language originally spoken by the Menominee people of northern Wisconsin and Michigan. It is still spoken on the Menominee Nation lands in northern Wisconsin in the United States.
The name of the tribe, and the language, Omāēqnomenew, comes from the word for wild rice, which was a staple of this tribe's diet for millennia. This designation for them (as Omanoominii) is also used by the Anishinaabe (Ojibwa), their Algonquian neighbors to the north.
The main characteristics of Menominee, as compared to other Algonquian languages, are its heavy use of the low front vowel /æ/, its rich negation morphology, and its lexicon. Some scholars (notably Bloomfield and Sapir) have classified it as a Central Algonquian language based on its phonology.
For good sources of information on both the Menominee and their language, some valuable resources include Leonard Bloomfield's 1928 bilingual text collection, his 1962 grammar (a landmark in its own right), and Skinner's earlier anthropological work.
Menominee is a highly endangered language, with only a handful of fluent speakers left. According to a 1997 report by the Menominee Historic Preservation Office, 39 people spoke Menominee as their first language, all of whom were elderly; 26 spoke it as their second language; and 65 others had learned some of it for the purpose of understanding the language and/or teaching it to others.
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