Ojibwe is an indigenous North American language of the Algonquian family spoken by about 45,000 people in Canada and 10,000 in the US.
Phonology[]
Grammar[]
Rather than having grammatical gender, Ojibwe nouns are either animate or inanimate. For the most part, animate nouns are living things and inanimate nouns are non-living things, but it isn't always so clear. For example, the word for "rock" is animate in Ojibwe.
Ojibwe is polysynthetic, meaning that a word can have many morphemes. There can be very long words that are complete sentences.
Orthography[]
There are several Ojibwe writing systems, none of which are standard across all dialects. One common system is the double-vowel system. How many letters it has depends on whether phonemes like ch, sh, and zh are alphabetized as single letters or as pairs. It can have these 26 letters: A, AA, B, CH, D, E, G, ', H, I, II, J, K, M, N, O, OO, P, S, SH, T, TH, W, Y, Z, ZH
The short vowels are a (as the u in the English "cup"), i (as in "sit"), and o (as in "obey" or "cook"). The long vowels are aa (as in "father"), e (as in "café"), ii (as in "seen"), and oo (as in "boat" or "boot").
Common difficulties[]
Resources[]
Pimsleur offers a course in Ojibwe.