Western Abenaki is a nearly extinct Algonquian language spoken by the Abenaki people in New Hampshire, Vermont, north-western Massachusetts, and southern Quebec.
Odanak, Quebec is a First Nations reserve located near the Saint-François River. After the 1700s and arrival of English colonists, they called these peoples Saint Francis Indians, after the river in their territory.
In his book L8dwaw8gan Wji Abaznodakaw8gan: The Language of Basket Making, fluent speaker Jesse Bruchac notes that Western Abenaki is a polysynthetic language. Abenaki consists of both dependent and independent grammar which addresses the gender of the speaker. Abenaki parts of speech include nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adjectives. The structure of the sentence or phrase varies depending on whether the noun is animate or inanimate.
The few remaining speakers of Western Abenaki live predominantly in Odanak. The last fully fluent speaker, Cécile (Wawanolett) Joubert, died in 2006. A revitalization effort was started in Odanak in 1994; however, as of 2004, younger generations are not learning the language. The remaining speakers are elderly, making Western Abenaki nearly extinct.
Revitalization As with most Indigenous languages, due to residential schooling and colonialism, and with the fading of generations, the number of speakers has declined. Abenaki had as few as twelve native speakers in 2015, but with recent focus and extra efforts in the Abenaki community, this number seems to be growing. Today, there are some passionate Abenaki, like Jeanne Brink, and non-Abenaki people who are trying to revitalize Abenaki culture, including their language and basket-making traditions. Currently, there are about 12,000 people of varying Abenaki heritage in the Canadian and New England regions. In Maine, there are about 3,000 Penobscot Native Americans, and this group is a large driving force of the language resurrection.
A new generation is actively preserving and revitalizing the language. The late Joseph Elie Joubert from the Odanak reservation and Bruchac, lead partial immersion classes in the language across the Northeastern United States. They have created several Abenaki books, audio, video, and web-based media to help others learn the language. Middlebury College in Vermont, in collaboration with Bruchac, opened its School of Abenaki in 2020, which offers a two-week immersion program in the summer.
In addition to Brink and others, Bruchac is a prominent voice in the Abenaki culture. He has written and published books in Abenaki, and served as a dialect/dialouge coach and composer for the National Geographic miniseries Saints & Strangers. The miniseries includes over an hour of dialouge in the Western Abenaki language and two hours of on-set actor training and filming.
Although written primarily in English, Aln8bak News helped to preserve the Western Abenaki language through the inclusion of Abenaki words and their translations. Aln8bak News was a quarterly newsletter that discussed cultural, historical, and contemporary information regarding the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook Abenaki. It was started in 1993 by Paul Pouilot, Sagamo of the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook Abenaki. The word / (pronounced ) is often used as a synonym for Abenaki. Initially the newsletter was called Aln8ba8dwa National News ( or means 'Speaking Abenaki'). Issues of the quarterly newsletter from 2003 to 2010 were published by the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook Abenaki on their website. According to a statement made by the Band, after 2010, they stopped publishing the newsletter on their website due to a lack of financial support from online readers. Aln8bak News included community-related information such as updates on governance issues, notices of social events, and obituaries. The newsletter also included Band history, genealogy, language lessons, recipes, plant and animal studies, books reviews, and writings by Band members.
Phonology
Vowels FrontCentralBackClose~~MidOpen-mid nasalOpen~
is a low back unrounded vowel; before in a final syllable it becomes close to in English 'gse'. is a mid-central unrounded vowel; pronounced like in the English word 'labl'; occurs only in the middle of a word between consonants. , pronounced like in the English word 'nd', occurs in only three words, where it is the initial segment–– 'which', 'who' and 'a spear'. is a lower-high front vowel; normally pronounced between the English words 'pt' and 'pt', it varies between the high front tense vowel and the mid front lax vowel . is a higher mid-back vowel pronounced like in the English word 'pke'; however, some speakers pronounce it like . is a rounded nasalized vowel.
Historically, it was common for speakers to drop between vowels and to drop before the nasal vowel .
Consonants Western Abenaki has 18 consonant sounds in total. BilabialAlveolarPalatalVelarLabio- velarGlottalPlosive Affricate Fricative NasalLateral approximantSemivowel In Western Abenaki there is a distinction between fortis consonants (always voiceless and aspirated) represented as , 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 . 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.
is a bilabial stop, tense, voiceless, unaspirated, and long in all positions; it is similar to the combined sounds of English ending a word and beginning the next, like in 'stoayment'. is a lax bilabial stop; between it is voiced and pronounced like in the English word 'habit'; beginning a word it is voiceless and pronounced like a weak English but unaspirated; at the end of a word it is voiceless and made long by the stress assigned on the final syllable. is a tense apico-alveolar stop that is always voiceless and long, longer than the English , similarly to the Western Abenaki . is a lax apico-alveolar stop that is voiced between resonants and pronounced like in English word 'boy'; at the start of a word it is voiceless and pronounced like a weak English 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 'hi'. is a tense, dorso-velar stop, long, voiceless and unaspirated in all positions and pronounced like in English word 'sore'. is a lax velar stop; between resonants is it pronounced like in English 'ao'; beginning a word it is pronounced like a weak unaspirated ; 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 in 'sore'. is a tense apico-alveolar affricate that is voiceless in all positions and pronounced by most speakers like /ts/ in English 'hats'. is an apico-alveolar affricate pronounced between resonants like the in English word 'ae'; at the start of a word it is pronounced like in the English word 'le'; at the end of a word it is pronounced like the in 'ha'. Historically, Western Abenaki speakers varied in the ways they pronounced the alveolar affricate phonemes and . More than half of the population pronounced them as and respectively, while the rest pronounced them as and . is a tense alveolar fricative that is always voiceless and long, much like the English in all positions. is a lax alveolar fricative that is voiced, and between resonants is pronounced like English ; voiceless when it is at the beginning of a word, both voiceless and long when it is at the end of a word. occurs only before a vowel or 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. is a bilabial nasal sonorant pronounced in all positions like English . is an apico-alveolar sonorant pronounced in all positions like English . 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. is a high front non-syllabic with a similar sound to but is pronounced before a vowel with greater tongue tension than . is a mid-back rounded non-syllabic with a similar sound to ; occurs before or after a vowel; at the end of a word after or it becomes a voiceless fricative.
Stress 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. Yet this assignment skips the vowel and falls to the next syllable, even if the nucleus of that syllable is also . In fact, the presence of the unstressed results instead in a lengthening of the preceding consonant and the vowel is often deleted in writing and rapid speech. Personal prefixes , , are not stressed, thus in words containing these prefixes, the stress shift will not occur on the syllable to the right.
As of 2004, linguists are unsure if a minimum syllable count is present in order for a word to be stressed.
Stress within sentences:
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.
Orthography 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.
The following table compares Masta and Laurent's orthographies. PhonemeAllophoneMastaLaurent'pph -pp / pppppbp / bbt'ttt / tttdtttdt / ddk'kkhkk / kkkgkkkgk / ggs'sshss / ssszssszs / zzc'cchcc / tschjcc / tscjc / j / dzjmmmmnnnnhhhhwww / uw / u / 'llll'llhhli (ɛ)i (ɛ)iiəəee / uaaaaɔ̃ɔ̃8ôooo / wo
Morphology 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.). 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.
Nouns 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 is animate while the word is inanimate. So the animacy of certain nouns must be learned individually.
Noun plurality The plural suffixes of both noun forms:
Animate: Inanimate:
Each suffix is used according to the final sound of the noun:
after ; both and become after after and the w drops (also sometimes words ending in or ) after after other consonants and the vowels
There are a few exceptions to these rules that have to be learned individually.
Pronouns