| Miami-Illinois | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in | Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma | |
| Language extinction | mid-20th century | |
| Language family | Algic
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | alg | |
| ISO 639-3 | mia | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
The Miami-Illinois language is a Native American Algonquian language formerly spoken in the United States, primarily in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, western Ohio and adjacent areas along the Mississippi River by the tribes of the Inoca or Illinois Confederacy, including the Kaskaskia, Peoria, Tamaroa, Cahokia, and Mitchigamea. Since the 1990s the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma has worked to revive it in a joint project with Miami University of Ohio.
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Miami-Illinois is an Algic language of the Algonquian family. The name "Miami-Illinois" is a cover term for a cluster of highly similar dialects, the primary ones being Miami proper, Peoria, Wea, and, in the older Jesuit records, Illinois. About half of the surviving several hundred speakers were displaced in the 19th century from their territories, eventually settling in northeastern Oklahoma as the Miami Nation and the Peoria Tribe. The remainder of the Miami stayed behind in northern Indiana.
The language was documented in written materials for over 200 years. Jacques Gravier, a Jesuit missionary who lived among the Kaskaskia tribe in the early 1700s, compiled an extensive and detailed Kaskaskia-French dictionary. It may have been transcribed by his assistants Gabriel Marest or Renee Tartarin, also missionaries.
Gravier's dictionary contained nearly 600 pages and 20,000 entries. It is the "most extensive of several manuscripts" which French missionaries made of the Illinois languages.[1] The original document is held by Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. During the 18th and 19th century, the Illinois were subject to extermination by hostile tribes, as well as encroachment by European settlers. The French abandoned the Kaskaskia mission.
Eventually many survivors went to the Indian Territory, where the group became known as the Peoria. Others among the Illinois remained in historic territory of present-day Indiana. Because of the decline among the number of Miami-Illinois speakers, the language was not studied as extensively as some Native American families. It was not until 2002 that the manuscript was edited and published, by Carl Masthay.[2]
The closest relatives of the Miami-Illinois are Sauk, Meskwaki, and Kickapoo, with Ojibwe, and Potawatomi more distantly related languages.
The language is considered extinct[3] because there are no longer people who speak Miami as a first language.[4]. But, since the mid-1990s, the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma has embarked on a strong language reclamation program . Many Miami members have described the language as "sleeping" rather than "extinct" since it was not irretrievably lost.[5]
The Myaamia Project for Language Revitalization and Cultural Awareness is a joint venture between the tribe and Miami University.[6] It is directed by Daryl Baldwin, who taught himself Miami from historic documents and studies and has developed educational programs. Project members have been translating missionary documents and publishing Miami culture and language materials.
The latter includes the following:
The revitalization effort was aided by the work of linguist David Costa. Based on his extensive studies, he published The Miami-Illinois Language in 1994 as his PhD. dissertation and as a book in 2003. The book reconstructs the Miami-Illinois language and all its grammatical features. A related project at Miami University is one on ethnobotany, which "pairs Miami-language plant names with elders' descriptions of traditional plant-gathering techniques."[8]
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