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Ojibwe has a series of three short oral vowels and four long ones. The two series are characterized by both length and quality differences. The short vowels are /ɪ o ə/ (roughly the vowels in American English bit, bot, and but, respectively) and the long vowels are /iː oː aː eː/ (roughly as in American English beet, boat, ball, and bay respectively).
The system embodies two principles: (1) alphabetic letters from the English alphabet are used to write Ojibwe but with Ojibwe sound values; (2) the system is phonemic in nature in that each letter or letter combination indicates its basic sound value and does not reflect all the phonetic detail that occurs. Accurate pronunciation thus cannot be ...
The general grammatical characteristics of Ojibwe are shared across its dialects. The Ojibwe language is polysynthetic, exhibiting characteristics of synthesis and a high morpheme-to-word ratio. Ojibwe is a head-marking language in which inflectional morphology on nouns and particularly verbs carries significant amounts of grammatical information.
Today, the majority of the first-language speakers of this dialect of the Ojibwe language are elderly, whose numbers are quickly diminishing, while the number of second-language speakers among the younger generation are growing. However, none of the second-language speakers have yet to transition to the fluency of a first-language speaker.
The Ojibwe language is known as Anishinaabemowin or Ojibwemowin, and is still widely spoken, although the number of fluent speakers has declined sharply. [16] Today, most of the language's fluent speakers are elders.
The vowel that was in the final Strong syllable in the singular form makizin and hence exempt from syncope is now in a Weak syllable because of the following suffix, and is eligible for deletion. The Ojibwe word 'my shoes' (non-syncopating dialects) has both the personal prefix and the plural suffix: nimakizinan.
Severn Ojibwe, also called Oji-Cree or Northern Ojibwa, and Anihshininiimowin in the language itself, is spoken in northern Ontario and northern Manitoba.Although there is a significant increment of vocabulary borrowed from several Cree dialects, Severn Ojibwe is a dialect of Ojibwe. [16]
Proto-Algonquian is one of the best-reconstructed proto-languages of the Americas. As it broke up, its daughters, such as Cree, Menominee, Ojibwe and Arapaho, changed the original phonology of Proto-Algonquian and gave rise to new languages.