Woods Cree

Woods Cree is an indigenous language spoken in Northern Manitoba, Northern Saskatchewan and Northern Alberta, Canada. It is part of the Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi dialect continuum. The dialect continuum has around 116,000 speakers; the exact population of Woods Cree speakers is unknown, estimated between 2,600 and 35,000.

Classification

The Woods Cree language belongs to the Algic family, within the Algonquian subfamily, and the central Cree– Montagnais–Naskapi language group.

Western Cree is a term used to refer to the non-palatized Cree dialects, consisting of Northern Plains Cree, Southern Plains Cree, Woods Cree, Rock Cree, Western Swampy Cree, Eastern Swampy Cree, Moose Cree, and Atikamekw.
Western Woods Cree is the term used to refer to the Cree languages west of the Hudson Bay. This includes the languages Rock Cree, western Swampy Cree, and Strongwoods or Bois Fort Cree. James G.E. Smith classified the linguistic nature of the languages of Woods Cree, northern Plains Cree, western Swampy Cree, and the extinct dialect of Misinipi or Rock Cree to all fall under the Western Woods Cree languages.

Another name for Woods Cree is Rocky Cree, translated by Rossignol (1939) from the Cree word . Rock Cree or Misinipi Cree was a ''"r"'' dialect of Cree but now have merged with Woods Cree, together as the ''"th"'' dialect of Cree spoken by the group of people geographically located at the eastern foot of the Rocky Mountains.

In Alberta, Woods Cree is also known as Bush Cree.

Precise classification of the Woods Cree language has not been sufficiently documented. Many different names and terms have been used in the description of the ''"th"'' dialect of Cree spoken in the forested area north of the Canadian prairies. A more general, all-encompassing term for this dialect is "Woodland Cree", which also refers to the cultural group living in the forested area north of the prairies. This term is used, for example, in separating the cultural groups of Cree people who live in the wooded area from the Plains Cree, who traditionally inhabited the prairies to the south.

The language portal of Canada has divided all Cree languages west of Ontario up until the Rocky Mountains into four main subgroups: Plains Cree, Swampy Cree, Moose Cree and Woods Cree. However, in referring to the Woods Cree language they use the terms Woodland and Rock interchangeably. Whether these terms are interchangeable when referring to the Cree ''"th"'' dialect however has not been explicitly determined.

History and Geographic Distribution

Different sources in Canadian history texts document the area in which Woods Cree was and still is spoken today. In the early 1900s, J.B. Tyrrell, a Canadian geologist and cartographer and the editor of explorer David Thompson's work found that the people living in the area of Île-à-la-Crosse and upper Churchill River referred to themselves as ''Nahathaway'' and spoke the particular ''-th'' dialect of Woods Cre''e.'' The Hudson's Bay Company had made record of the area west of James Bay being inhabited by people speaking the ''-th'' dialect of Cree. This region of Woods Cree speakers has essentially remained the same until present.

Traditionally Woods Cree was often divided into western and eastern Woods Cree, reaching as far east as Quebec. However, the actual Woods Cree language is now determined to be spoken in the mid-northern part of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Western Woods Cree is the category of Cree languages spoken west of the Hudson Bay and in the boreal forested area across the northern provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.

Demographics

In 1982 SIL (Summer Institute for Languages) found that the population of Woods Cree speakers was 35,000 people. More recently the University of Regina has documented that of the approximately 75,000 speakers of Cree across in Canada, 20,000 of them live in Saskatchewan, which is the main area where Woods Cree is spoken. Not only is this finding much less than the 1982 statistic, but this estimation accounts for all types of spoken Cree, not just Woods Cree spoken in Saskatchewan - but note that the Woods Cree spoken outside of Saskatchewan is not accounted for in this statistic. According to the 2016 Canadian Census there were 1,840 individuals who identified Woods Cree as their mother tongue, and 2,665 individuals who said they had some knowledge of Woods Cree. There were also 64,050 people who identified a non-specified dialect of Cree as their mother tongue, and 86,115 who said they had some knowledge of a non-specified dialect of Cree. Some of those individuals could be Woods Cree speakers.

Official Status

Woods Cree is not an official language of any country. Speakers of Woods Cree live in and around the northern, forested area of Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

Phonology

Like other western Cree languages and dialects, Woods Cree only contains seventeen different phonemes. This is a fairly small phonemic inventory for a language; for example, Canadian English distinguishes thirty-eight phonemes. The following phonemes can be found in western Cree languages and dialects: /a, â, c, ê, h, i, î, k, m, n, o, ô, p, s, t, w, y/. Woods Cree differs only in merging /ê/ with /î/ (and thus decreasing the vowel inventory by one down to six distinct vowels) but adding "th" (/ ð/) as the reflex of Proto-Algonquian *r (and thus maintaining a distinct phoneme that the other Western dialects have lost).

Consonants

Vowels

An important aspect of the Cree vowel system is that the Proto Algonquian short /e/ phoneme merged with short /i/ phoneme as shown above. In Woods Cree the long /eː/ also has merged with the long /iː/ phoneme. Phonetically, these two sounds may also alternate. This results in the vowel system of Woods Cree consisting of only three long vowels /iː uː aː/ and three short vowels /i u a/ in the entire language.

Nonpalatalized ''-th''

The distinguishing feature of Woods Cree is the use of the nonpalatalized ''-th'' sound in places where other dialects of Cree would use a different sound: for example, Plains Cree is known for using the ''-y'' phoneme. This can be demonstrated by the Cree word for 'I'. In Woods Cree the word for 'I' is (IPA: []) whereas in Plains Cree it would be pronounced (IPA: , spelled ᓂᔭ in Cree syllabics, Cree orthography. A significant distinction between Woods Cree and Plains Cree has been questioned in the analysis and history of the language. Various researchers and explorers throughout history however have concluded that there is a "loss of intelligibility between Woods Cree and Plains Cree", distinguishing them as separate languages.

Voiced Dental Fricative patterns ( ð)

Cree / ð/ shares features both with obstruents and sonorants. Many languages around the globe have been recorded using the / ð/ phoneme and in most of these cases this phoneme is classified as an obstruent. However, the / ð/ phoneme in spoken Woods Cree has resemblance to a sonorant phoneme. Most of the evidence demonstrated in the article even concludes that it would be more logical to classify this phoneme as a sonorant due to the following five factors: the sonorant realizations of the / ð/ phoneme, the placement of the / ð/ phoneme in the phonological inventory, the voicing patterns of this phoneme in non-word final positions, the usage of /l/ phoneme as a replacement for / ð/ phoneme in caregiver speech, and lastly the /l/ and / ð/ phoneme replacement of /r/ in English loan words. In Proto-Algonquian, the / ð/ phoneme of Woods Cree has been reconstructed as ''*l'' and, thus, also demonstrates its relation to being categorized as a sonorant. This analysis is challenged however by particular factors which show the likeness of / ð/ as an obstruent. For example, among younger speakers the / ð/ phoneme is sometimes replaced by a /t/ and voicing in word-final positions also shows that it also falls under obstruent classification. One reason for this particularly unique form of the / ð/ phoneme as explained in the article is a possible phonological shift that is occurring in Woods Cree speech due to the influence of the English phonology on the language, however, the data is inconclusive due to the endangered status of the language.

Morphology

The Woods Cree morphological form follows a similar system to that of other Western Cree dialects (for example, Swampy Cree or Plains Cree). A more comprehensive examination of the Western Cree morphological system relating to Woods Cree can be found on the Swampy Cree Wikipedia page.

Cree languages are polysynthetic and can have single words that would need an entire sentence to properly be expressed in English.

For example:

Cree is also considered to be a highly inflectional language with all of its inflection being suffixation with the exception of the four personal prefixes.

Third Person Indefinite Possessor

Woods Cree morphology follows the Western Cree system of morphology. Specific to Woods Cree is use of third person indefinite possessors than in other dialects of Cree. The Proto-Algonquian definite possessor prefix is reconstructed as ''*me-'' in Bloomfield (1946) Hamp (1976) expands on Bloomfield's analysis by finding in contrast *''we-'' to be the definite human/animal possessor and *''me-'' to be the indefinite possessor prefix.

As found in other dialects of Cree, the following possessor prefixes are used in Woods Cree:

* ''ni-'' referring to first person possession (in English: 'my')
* ''yi-'' referring to second person possession (in English: 'your')
* ''o-'' referring to third person definite possession (in English: 'his/her')
* ''mi-'' referring to third person indefinite possession (in English: 'someone's')

In most dialects of Cree the prefix ''mi-'' is used when describing nouns regarding an undetermined body part, clothing items, and members of kin. For example, a pair of pants (noun requiring a possessor), undetermined in whom they belong to would be preceded with the ''mi-'' prefix. In Woods Cree the ''mi-'' prefix is not applied to members of kin as well as body parts unique to animals. This difference helps demonstrate the dialect difference between Woods Cree and other types of Cree. Plains Cree, for example, does apply indefinite third person possessors when referring to kin.

Future Markers

In Pukatawagan Woods Cree, specific usage of the future markers have been determined. Woods Cree spoken in this area, like other Cree dialects, uses the future markers ''ka-'' as the second person future marker. It has been agreed that this is a reduction of the second person prefix ''ki-'' and the future marker ''ka-''. The first person future marker ''na-'' however does not follow the same reduction patterns (combining ''ni-'' first person prefix and ''ka-'' future marker). It has determined instead to be a portmanteau