Western Abenaki language

Western Abenaki is a nearly extinct Algonquian language spoken by the Abenaki people in New Hampshire, Vermont, north-western Massachusetts, and southern Quebec.^[2] Odanak, Quebec is a First Nations reserve located near the Saint-François River—these peoples were referred to as Saint Francis Indians by English writers after the 1700s.^[3]

The few remaining speakers of Western Abenaki live predominantly in Odanak and the last fully fluent speaker, Cécile (Wawanolett) Joubert died in 2006.^[2] A revitalization effort was started in Odanak in 1994; however, as of 2004, younger generations are not learning the language and the remaining speakers are elderly, making Western Abenaki nearly extinct.^[4]

• /a/ is a low back unrounded vowel; before /m/ in a final syllable it becomes close to [u] in English 'goose'.^[3]
• /ə/ is a mid-central unrounded vowel; pronounced like in the English word 'label'; occurs only in the middle of a word between consonants.
• /e/, pronounced like in the English word 'end', occurs in only three words, where it is the initial segment––enni 'which', enna 'who' and enigakw 'a spear'.^[3]
• /i/ is a lower-high front vowel; normally pronounced between the English words 'peat' and 'pit', it varies between the high front tense vowel [i] and the mid front lax vowel [e].^[3][4]
• /o/ is a higher mid-back vowel pronounced like in the English word 'poke'; however, some speakers pronounce it like [ʊ].^[3]
• /ɔ̃/ is a rounded nasalized vowel.^[4][5]

Historically, it was common for speakers to drop /h/ between vowels and to drop /w/ before the nasal vowel [ɔ̃].^[3]

Western Abenaki has 18 consonant sounds in total.^[4][6]

In Western Abenaki there is a distinction between fortis consonants (always voiceless and aspirated) represented as [p, t, k, s, ts], and lenis consonants (voiced between resonants, voiceless in word-initial and word-final positions and before a fortis consonant, unaspirated but become aspirated when they close a strongly accented syllable, which includes all final syllables) represented as [b, d, g, z, dz].^[3][4] The lenis consonants generally exist between vowels and at the end of words but rarely next to each other or at the beginning of words.^[3]

• /p/ is a bilabial stop, tense, voiceless, unaspirated, and long in all positions; it is similar to the combined sounds of English /p/ ending a word and beginning the next, like in 'stop payment'.^[3]
• /b/ is a lax bilabial stop; between [a, e, i, o, j, m, n, l] it is voiced and pronounced like in the English word 'habit'; beginning a word it is voiceless and pronounced like a weak English /p/ but unaspirated; at the end of a word it is voiceless and made long by the stress assigned on the final syllable.^[3]
• /t/ is a tense apico-alveolar stop that is always voiceless and long, longer than the English /t/, similarly to the Western Abenaki /p/.
• /d/ is a lax apico-alveolar stop that is voiced between resonants and pronounced like in English word 'body'; at the start of a word it is voiceless and pronounced like a weak English /t/ but unaspirated; at the end of a word is it voiceless and made long and tense by the stress assigned on the final syllable, pronounced like in English 'hit'.^[3]
• /k/ is a tense, dorso-velar stop, long, voiceless and unaspirated in all positions and pronounced like /k/ in English word 'score'.^[3]
• /g/ is a lax velar stop; between resonants is it pronounced like in English 'ago'; beginning a word it is pronounced like a weak unaspirated [k]; at the end of a word it is voiceless and made long and tense by the stress assigned on the final syllable, pronounced like English /k/ in 'score'.^[3]
• /ts/ is a tense apico-alveolar affricate that is voiceless in all positions and pronounced by most speakers like /ts/ in English 'hats'.^[3]
• /dz/ is an apico-alveolar affricate pronounced between resonants like the /dz/ in English word 'adze'; at the start of a word it is pronounced like /ts/ in the English word 'lets'; at the end of a word it is pronounced like the /ts/ in 'hats'.^[3]
  • It is important to note that historically Western Abenaki speakers varied in the ways they pronounced the alveolar affricate phonemes /ts/ and /dz/. More than half of the population pronounced them as [ts] and [dz] respectively, while the rest pronounced them as [ʃ] and [ʒ].^[3]
• /s/ is a tense alveolar fricative that is always voiceless and long, much like the English /s/ in all positions.^[3]
• /z/ is a lax alveolar fricative that is voiced, and between resonants is pronounced like English /z/; voiceless when it is at the beginning of a word, both voiceless and long when it is at the end of a word.^[3]
• /h/ occurs only before a vowel or /l/ and is pronounced like in English word 'heel', 'hat', or 'hit'; lax consonants before it become voiceless; when is it between vowels it is usually dropped by speakers in most words.^[3]
• /m/ is a bilabial nasal sonorant pronounced in all positions like English /m/.^[3]
• /n/ is an apico-alveolar sonorant pronounced in all positions like English /n/.^[3]
• /l/ is a lateral sonorant; it is pronounced with a lot of tongue tension and is influenced by the vowel which follows it, or, in syllable-final position, by the vowel that precedes it.^[3]
• /j/ is a high front non-syllabic with a similar sound to {{IPA|[i]} but is pronounced before a vowel with greater tongue tension than [i].^[3]
• /w/ is a mid-back rounded non-syllabic with a similar sound to [o]; occurs before or after a vowel; at the end of a word after /k/ or /g/ it becomes a voiceless fricative.^[3]

There is not one Western Abenaki orthography that is generally accepted by linguists or Abenaki speakers, but speakers typically do understand the orthographies of Joseph Laurent and Henry Lorne Masta––Western Abenaki writers who taught the language at Odanak.^[3]

The following table compares Masta and Laurent's orthographies.^[4]

Stress within words in Western Abenaki is based on an alternating stress rule:

• Stress is initially assigned to the final syllable and then to every other syllable from right to left.^[4][7] Yet this assignment skips the vowel /ə/ and falls to the next syllable, even if the nucleus of that syllable is also /ə/.^[4] In fact, the presence of the unstressed /ə/ results instead in a lengthening of the preceding consonant and the vowel is often deleted in writing and rapid speech.^[3][7]
• Personal prefixes ne-, ke-, we- are not stressed, thus in words containing these prefixes, the stress shift will not occur on the syllable to the right.^[7]

As of 2004, linguists are unsure if a minimum syllable count is present in order for a word to be stressed.^[4]

Stress within sentences:^[8]

• In a declarative sentence, the pitch goes from high-low.
• Questions have a low-high pitch at the end of the sentence, yet the entire sentence is generally said with a higher pitch.
• Stressed syllables that exist in the middle of a sentence tend to be pronounced at a standard pitch level.

When a word is pronounced on its own, its stressed final syllable is typically high pitched. However, this is not necessarily characteristic of the specific word, because as stated above, declarative sentences end on a low pitch.^[8]

The words of Western Abenaki are generally made up of a central core (the root) with affixes attached. Often a single word will translate to a phrase in English. The affixes themselves typically do not translate to just one word either. Western Abenaki utilizes both suffixes and prefixes, often in combination (prefix-...-suffix; ...-suffix -suffix; etc.).^[5] The affixes tend to be quite short compared to the root of the word. With these observations in mind, Western Abenaki can be considered a synthetic agglutinative language.

Like all Algonquin languages, the animacy of nouns is important to distinguish in Western Abenaki. Animate nouns refer to animals, people, and other living or powerful things. Inanimate nouns refer to lifeless things. This is necessary to know because the animacy of a noun plays a large role in what form the endings of other words connected to them will take. However, some classifications are arbitrary. For example, the word zegweskimen 'raspberry' is animate while the word zata 'blueberry' is inanimate. So the animacy of certain nouns must be learned individually.^[5]

The plural suffixes of both noun forms:

• Animate: -ak, -ik, -ok, -k
• Inanimate: -al, -il, -ol, -l

Each suffix is used according to the final sound of the noun:

• -ik after d, t; both -dik and -tik become -jik
• -il after g, k
• -ok, -ol after -gw, -kw and the w drops (also sometimes words ending in m or n)
• -k, -l after a, ô
• -ak, -al after other consonants and the vowels o, i

There are a few exceptions to these rules that have to be learned individually.

In most Western Abenaki sentences, pronouns are expressed as affixes attached to other words. However, separate words are sometimes used to emphasize the pronoun in use.^[5]

The first person plural exclusive and inclusive pronouns are very important distinctions in Western Abenaki. The inclusive form means you are including the person you are talking to in the "we" or "us", while the exclusive form means you are excluding them from the "we" or "us".

The form of the possessive pronoun affix you must use depends on the sound next to it. The forms nd-, kd-, wd- are used if the word begins with a vowel. The w- forms become o- in front of consonants. If a k- form needs to be attached to a word that begins with g- or k-, they fuse into a single k- as the prefix. Possessive pronoun prefixes are written with an apostrophe before the word (as shown in examples below).

Note that /w/ is pronounced as /o/ when it appears at the beginning or end of a word before a consonant or between two consonants. It is sometimes written as ⟨o⟩ in these situations and is still considered a consonant.

Examples of the possessive pronoun affixes on an animate and inanimate noun:

Two main verb distinctions in Western Abenaki are intransitive verbs and transitive verbs.^[5]

• Intransitive verbs only need one participant that is doing the action or has the quality, such as 'to run', 'to jump', or 'to be angry'. Western Abenaki examples are abi 'to sit' and aloka 'to work'.
• Transitive verbs need two participants: one doing the action (subject) and one being acted on (object), such as 'to hit', 'to see', 'to love'. Western Abenaki examples are namiha 'to see' and wawtam 'to understand something'.

In thinking about these two verb types along with Western Abenaki's distinction between animate and inanimate things, this results in a split of four different types of verbs in Western Abenaki (which is true of all Algonquian languages).

There are seven morphophonological processes in Western Abenaki. These processes are used to describe the changes to affixes that occur when they are combined in different ways.^[4]

• Vowel truncation –– the initial vowel of a suffix is deleted when it follows a vowel. The only exception is -wi followed by peripheral formatives, here the initial vowel of the suffix is not deleted.  
• Final glide delegation –– suffix-final glide w is deleted after a vowel when the suffix is word-final.
• Vocalization –– glide w changes to a vowel o when the glide becomes the nucleus of a syllable due to affixation.
• Coalescence of aw+e –– the combination of aw+e results in a single vowel o or 8.
• Coalescence of aw+a –– the preterit -ob is created from the combination of aw+ab(ani).
• Coalescence of a+a –– long /a:/ becomes nasalized [ɔ̃] in some instances such as -ba+ab(ani).
• Coalescence of wV –– w coalescence that explains why the plural peripheral formative -ak occasionally becomes -ok.

In general, the sentence structure appears to be SOV (Subject-Object-Verb), but word order is largely free, being mainly dependent on pragmatic factors.^[4][8] While the verb phrase tends to not have a common, basic order, there are still complementizer phrases and inflectional phrases that are more clear.^[8] In Abenaki, there are no apparent complementizers, but it is assumed that wh-words (who, what, when, why) start complementizer phrases, while declarative sentences are assumed to be inflectional phrases.^[8]

Enclitic particles function in a syntactically interesting way. In Western Abenaki, there are ten enclitic particles.^[8]

These are also known as 'second-position' clitics because they come after the first word within the complementizer phrase or inflectional phrase.^[8] However, clitics do not always simply follow the first word of a sentence. Clitics can also attach to clause-initial conjunctions, such as tta 'and', ni 'and then', and ala 'or' or to the word that follows the conjunction.^[8] A focused noun phrase sometimes appears between a conjunction and the word that could potentially host the clitic, in this case the clitic will not be attached to the conjunction, but to the word after the noun phrase.^[8] In general, though they may typically exist in the second word of the sentence, clitics are mainly clause dependent, and are situated according to what clauses are functioning in a sentence and where, according to conjunctions.^[8]

A root is an element in a stem; it does not have lexical meaning like a stem does. In other words, a root is dependent on other pieces of meaning to create a word.

This list is just a handful of Western Abenaki roots. Roots attached to the front of a stem are written with a hyphen at the front (typically refer people or parts of the body), roots that are attached to the end of a stem are written with a hyphen at the end, and roots that constitute the only element of a stem are written without a hyphen.^[3]

* letters in square brackets often lost in vowel syncope.

• Bach, Emmon (2014). "Wôbanakiôdwawôgan: Sketch of Western Abenaki Grammar". Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series. Amherst: University of Massachusetts. — this paper has been withdrawn
• Beach, Jesse (2004). The Morphology of Modern Western Abenaki (Thesis). Dartmouth College.
• Day, Gordon M. (1994a). Western Abenaki Dictionary. Vol. 1: Abenaki to English. Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization. ISBN 978-0-660-14024-7.
• Day, Gordon M. (1994b). Western Abenaki Dictionary. Vol. 2: English to Abenaki. Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization. ISBN 978-0-660-14030-8.
• Harvey, Chris. "Abenaki". Language Geek. Retrieved 2007-03-12.
• Heald, B. (2014). A History of the New Hampshire Abenaki. Charleston, SC: The History Press.
• Laurent, Joseph (2006) [1884, Quebec, Joseph Laurent]. New Familiar Abenakis. Vancouver: Global Language Press. ISBN 0-9738924-7-1.
• LeSourd, Philip S. (June 2011). "Enclitic Particles in Western Abenaki: The Syntax of Second Position". Anthropological Linguistics. 53 (2): 91–131. doi:10.1353/anl.2011.0009.
• LeSourd, Philip S. (July 2015). "Enclitic Particles in Western Abenaki: Form and Function". International Journal of American Linguistics. 81 (3): 301–335. doi:10.1086/681577. S2CID 141980112.
• Masta, Henry Lorne (2008) [1932; Victoriaville, QC; La Voix des Bois-Franes]. Abenaki Legends, Grammar and Place Names. Toronto: Global Language Press. ISBN 978-1-897367-18-6.
• Voorhis, Paul (October 1979). Grammatical Notes on the Penobscot Language from Frank Speck's Penobscot Transformer Tales. University of Manitoba Anthropology Papers. Vol. 24. hdl:1993/18305.
• Warne, Janet (1975). A historical phonology of Abenaki (MA thesis). McGill University.

• Western Abenaki Online Dictionary and Radio
• Western Abenaki grammar sketch
• Western Abenaki morphology