| Broken Oghibbeway | |
|---|---|
| Region | Wisconsin, Mississippi valley |
Native speakers | None |
Ojibwe-basedpidgin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| Glottolog | brok1252 |
During thefur trade era, apidgin form ofOjibwe known asBroken Oghibbeway was used as atrade language in theWisconsin andMississippi River valleys. Data on the language was collected during the 1820s atPrairie du Chien, Wisconsin, byEdwin James, a physician and naturalist, who also gave the pidgin its name.[1] It has been described as "…a language with a restricted vocabulary drawn from the Ottawa dialect of Ojibwe with a few words from theFox language, another Algonquian language of the region, and restructured and reduced, but not absent,Ojibwe morphology."[2]
James recognized that Broken Oghibbeway was different from the variety of Ojibwe spoken inWisconsin Territory. He noted that it "…is of the dialect used by the traders and thepeople of mixed blood in speaking with theMenomonies andWinnebagoes also many of theSioux,Sauks andFoxes."[2]
Although Broken Oghibbeway retains many aspects of the complex inflectional morphology that characterizes Ojibwe, it is nonetheless simplified and restructured, with reductions in the treatment oftransitivity andgender, with simplification of the system ofpersonal prefixes used on verbs, loss of thenegative suffix that occurs on verbs, and loss of inflectional suffixes that indicategrammatical objects.[3]
For example, in Ojibwe, the inverse marker is suffixed to the animate stem of the verb to express the present tense and a prefix is added to indicate the object of the sentence.[4]
However, in Broken Oghibbeway, the inanimate verb stem is used and the object of a sentence is expressed with an independent pronoun.
Animacy distinctions for nouns were completely lost in Broken Oghibbeway, but are somewhat preserved for verbs: animate third person subjects are marked in the verb with theo- prefix, while inanimate subjects have no prefix.[5]