Aacimohtaatiiyankwi

Written by: Hunter Thompson Lockwood

There are hundreds and hundreds of different Native American languages – where does Myaamiaataweenki ‘the Myaamia language,’ fit into that picture? What’s shared with its closest relatives – and what does it even mean to say “these two languages are related” – and what makes it unique? In this post, I’ll share a linguist’s perspective on those questions.

Myaamiaataweenki and Miami-Illinois

You’ll notice that sometimes we linguists will talk about Myaamiaataweenki specifically, and other times we’ll use the term “Miami-Illinois” instead. What’s the difference?

David Costa, head of the Language Research Office here at the Myaamia Center, says it best: Miami-Illinois is a “cover term…coined by linguists to include several different forms of speech that are all considered to be the same language, including “the speech of not only the Myaamiaki, but also the Peewaaliaki (Peorias), Waayaahtanooki (Weas), Peeyankihšiaki (Piankeshaws), Kaahkaahkiaki (Kaskaskias), and any other Inohkaki (Illinois) tribes” (today, these tribes are confederated and are known as the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, and they call their language Peewaaliaataweenki, or simply Peewaalia). 

It’s a general way of talking about all of those different groups.

For people who study language records, it’s useful to generalize because, as Dave lays out in his blog post, Miami-Illinois people apparently all spoke so similarly that nobody was able to tell them apart. Charles Hockett was probably the only linguist to ever really try to tease apart the differences, and his own (admittedly limited) study showed that Myaamia and Peewaalia languages were exactly the same over 98% of the time. If you want to know more about that, check out Dave’s blog post!

Zooming Out: Algonquian Language Family

In linguistics, a language family is a group of languages where we have evidence that they were all once united; we can trace their lineage back to a single source and show how all of the languages of the family have inherited sounds, words, structures, and meanings that they all still share in common.

Within a language family, there are some languages that are closer than others; linguists refer to those as “subgroups” or “branches”. For example, if you ever studied both French and Spanish, you might notice how similar they are to each other – they’re both members of the Romance subgroup of the Indo-European language family.

Back to the subject at hand: Miami-Illinois is a member (or perhaps a branch, depending on your perspective) of the Algonquian language family. You’ve probably heard of a lot of other Algonquian languages, including Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Menominee, Cree, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Powhatan, Meskwaki, Sauk, Kickapoo, Shawnee, Mohican, and many, many more.

Shared Similarities & Shared Differences

“Hold on,” I hear some of you saying. “What does it even mean to say that two languages are related? And how do you even know?”

Starting in the 1800s, linguists began developing tools that allowed us to figure out if two languages were actually related, or if they just happened to share some similarities, including what we now call the comparative method in historical linguistics. A deep dive into this method would take us far beyond a single blog post – historical linguistics classes at the graduate level take weeks to explore it in detail! – but a brief overview should show you just how similar the Algonquian languages really are.

First, we pick a few languages to focus on, languages which we hypothesize are all closely related: for this post, I’ve chosen Miami-Illinois, Ojibwe, and Meskwaki. Second, we start putting together lists of words, so we can compare how similar or how different they are.

To keep this example brief, we’ll focus on just four words, but that should still get the point across.

Meaning	Miami-Illinois	Ojibwe	Meskwaki
‘two’	niišwi	niizh	nîshwi
‘bear’	mahkwa	makwa	mahkwa
‘river’	siipiwi	ziibi	sîpôwi
‘sleep!’ (command)	nipaalo!	nibaan!	nepâno!

Even just looking at a few examples, we can see that these three languages have deep and fundamental similarities. For example, Miami-Illinois and Meskwaki have the exact same basic pattern of consonants with no differences whatsoever. The consonants in Ojibwe are very slightly different, but the pattern is predictable and totally regular – so in the words for ‘river’ and ‘sleep’, Ojibwe has b in positions where the other two languages have p; in ‘bear’, Ojibwe has k where the other two languages have hk. You could add hundreds more examples to this table and see the same pattern play out over and over again, with even more shared vocabulary items. (And that just scratches the surface! What other patterns of similarities and differences do you see?)

From here, the comparative method then goes into a lot more technical detail. For example, we can conclude beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ojibwe b is an innovation; it had to have originally been p, just like in Meskwaki and Miami-Illinois. We know this for two reasons: p is more common across the languages we’re looking at (majority rules!) and, maybe more importantly, p turns to b in between vowels all the time (but the opposite almost never happens).

So we know that these languages we call Algonquian are all related to each other because they are so similar, but it’s not just that they’re a lot alike: their similarities are regular, predictable, and patterned.

Vertical and Horizontal Relationships

When a language inherits a word, we can think about that “vertically” – imagining the ancestral languages at the top of a diagram, and the modern languages at the bottom, we can draw a vertical line that connects the two. But we can also talk about “horizontal” relationships – similarities and differences between languages can arise because two communities exchanged words.

So, for instance, if we compare a few scattered cases, we can see similarities between Miami-Illinois and Siouan languages like Hoocąk (also called Ho-Chunk or Winnebago) and Tutelo.

Meaning	Miami-Illinois	Ojibwe	Meskwaki	Siouan
Eight	palaani	ishwaaswi	shwâshika	palá·nį (Tutelo)
Potawatomi	waahoonaha	boodawaadamii	pehkînenîha	wooraxe (Hoocąk)

The situation here is more complicated. The Ojibwe and Meskwaki words for the number 8 are very similar, but not totally identical. On the other hand, the Miami-Illinois word matches nearly perfectly with a word from a Siouan language that was once spoken nearby. Even more complicated, the name that Ojibwe and Meskwaki people used for the Potawatomi people doesn’t match at all, whereas the Miami-Illinois word once again matches a Siouan language nearly perfectly.

What do we do with this information? Well, if we look at hundreds of words, or even just a few dozen words, we’ll quickly run out of Miami-Illinois words that match Siouan words; the relationship does not hold across the entire vocabulary. That means the words they do share are the exception, and not the rule.

So what happened here wasn’t inheritance – it was borrowing!

And how do languages borrow words from each other? Well, we should be careful in our thinking here: “languages” can’t do anything; the people who speak languages do things, and people borrow words from each other when they speak different languages and regularly interact with each other over a long period of time. It definitely doesn’t happen overnight; this kind of influence takes generations, and often reflects at least some level of bilingualism.

Put simply, the fact that Miami-Illinois has even a few Siouan words means that, at some point in the past, speakers of two totally different languages, from two totally different communities, were talking to each other regularly enough to understand each other and share ideas.

What Makes Miami-Illinois Unique?

But there are some parts of the Myaamia language that are totally unique and never seen in any other Algonquian language.

I could bring up a number of unique words, unique sound changes, unique bits of grammar – and we’ve already seen a few instances of that in this post – but my favorite example is miincipi ‘corn’. This word doesn’t exist anywhere else; it’s pure Myaamia!

If you want to know more about what makes Miami-Illinois unique, let us know in the comments!

Wrapping Up

Before English became dominant, Indigenous people spoke hundreds of different languages across what we now call North America. In some cases, their neighbors’ languages were very similar, reflecting a shared history, and in other cases their languages were unbelievably different. Either way, people from different tribes not only knew about their neighbors’ languages, but some level of bilingualism or multilingualism must also have been the norm.

Additional Credits:

Featured Photo by Jonathan Fox, Myaamia Center.