| Description:
The Shawnee language is a Central Algonquian language spoken in parts of central and northeastern Oklahoma by only around 200 Shawnee, making it very endangered. It was originally spoken in Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. It is closely related to the other Algonquian languages Mesquakie-Sauk (Sac and Fox) and Kickapoo.
Stress in Shawnee falls on the final syllable of a word.
Shawnee has four short vowels, /i e a o/ (where /i/ and /e/ are phonetically [ɪ] and [ɛ]) and four long vowels, /iː eː aː oː/.
Some speakers of Shawnee pronounce /ʃ/ more like an alveolar /s/. This pronunciation is especially common among Loyal Band Shawnee speakers near Vinita, Oklahoma.
Shawnee shares many grammatical features with other Algonquian languages. There are two third persons, proximate and obviative, and two noun classes (or genders), animate and inanimate. It is primarily agglutinating typologically, and is polysynthetic, resulting in a great deal of information being encoded on the verb. The most common word order is Verb-Subject...... full article at Wikipedia |
