Atsina, or Gros Ventre (also known as ''Aaniiih, Ananin, Ahahnelin, Ahe, A’ani,'' and ), is the ancestral language of the

Gros Ventre The Gros Ventre ( , ; meaning 'big belly'), also known as the A'aninin, Atsina, or White Clay, are a historically Algonquian-speaking Native American tribe located in northcentral Montana. Today, the Gros Ventre people are enrolled in the Fort ...

people of what is today

Montana Montana ( ) is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North Dakota to the east, South Dakota to the southeast, Wyoming to the south, an ...

United States of America The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguo ...

. The last fluent speaker died in 2007, though revitalization efforts are underway.

History

Atsina is the name applied by specialists in Algonquian linguistics.

Arapaho The Arapaho ( ; , ) are a Native American people historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota and Dakota. By the 1850s, Arapaho bands formed t ...

and Atsina are dialects of a common language usually designated by scholars as "Arapaho-Atsina". Historically, this language had five dialects, and on occasion specialists add a third dialect name to the label, resulting in the designation, "Arapaho-Atsina-Nawathinehena". Compared with Arapaho proper, Gros Ventre had three additional phonemes , , , and , and lacked the velar fricative . Theresa Lamebull taught the language at Fort Belknap College (now

Aaniiih Nakoda College Aaniiih Nakoda College (ANC, formerly Fort Belknap College) is a Public college, public Tribal college, tribal Land-grant university, land-grant community college on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Harlem, Montana. The institution incorpo ...

), and helped develop a dictionary using the Phraselator when she was 109. As of 2012, the White Clay Immersion School at Aaniiih Nakoda College was teaching the language to 26 students, up from 11 students in 2006.

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Notes

References

External links

Native Languages of the Americas: Gros Ventre (Ahe, Ahahnelin, Aane, Atsina)

Fort Belknap College
Gros Ventre Dictionary

OLAC Record entry for Gros Ventre
Gros Ventre Plains Algonquian languages Indigenous languages of the North American Plains Indigenous languages of Montana Endangered Algic languages Endangered languages of the United States Native American language revitalization Endangered Indigenous languages of the Americas {{indigenousAmerican-lang-stub