Miami-Illinois language

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The Miami-Illinois language is a Native American language formerly spoken in the United States, primarily in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, and adjacent areas along the Mississippi River by the tribes of the Inoca or Illinois Confederacy, including the Kaskaskia, Peoria, Tamaroa, Cahokia, and Mitchigamea. A language so similar it is considered a dialect of the same language was spoken by the Miami of Indiana, hence the name Miami-Illinois. Its speakers were displaced from their territories, eventually settling in northeastern Oklahoma as the Miami Nation and the Peoria Tribe. The language was documented in written materials for over 200 years; the largest contribution being a dictionary compiled by Jaques Gravier, a Jesuit missionary who lived among the Kaskaskia tribe in the early 1700's. The document was a Kaskaskia to French dictionary, nearly 600 pages and 20,000 entries in length. The manuscript was edited and published by Carl Masthay in 2002.

David Costa published The Miami-Illinois Language in 1994 as his Ph.D. dissertation and as a book in 2003. The book reconstructs the Miami-Illinois language and all its grammatical features. This was a huge addition to a revitalization effort spearheaded by the Miami Tribe, ongoing since the mid 1990's. This project, the Myaamia Project, has been involved in the translation of missionary documents and publication of Miami culture and language materials. These include a children's book of Miami language and culture, an audio CD set with vocabulary, phrases, conversation, and the Miami origin story and a companion text, and a compilation of traditional stories from the Miami and Peoria tribes recorded in the early 1900's when the language's last speakers were alive.

Miami-Illinois is an Algic language of the Algonquian family. The language is currently considered "extinct" because there are no fluent native speakers of the language, but there has been a strong language reclamation program since the mid 1990s of the Miami dialect.

External links

• Myaamia Project

References

• Costa, David J. (2003). The Miami-Illinois Language. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Last updated on Wednesday March 12, 2008 at 08:25:13 PDT (GMT -0700)
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