Maliseet-Passamaquoddy ( ; skicinuwatuwewakon or skicinuwi-latuwewakon) or Peskotomuhkati-Wolastoqey is an endangered Algonquian language spoken by the Wolastoqey and Passamaquoddy peoples along both sides of the border between Maine in the United States and New Brunswick, Canada. The language consists of two major dialects: Maliseet, which is mainly spoken in the Saint John River Valley in New Brunswick; and Passamaquoddy, spoken mostly in the St. Croix River Valley of eastern Maine. However, the two dialects differ only slightly, mainly in their phonology. The Wolastoqiyik and Passamaquoddy widely spoke Maliseet-Passamaquoddy in these areas until around the post–World War II era when changes in the education system and increased marriage outside of the speech community caused a large decrease in the number of children who learned or regularly used the language.Leavitt, Robert M. Passamaquoddy-Maliseet. 1996. Newcastle: Lincom Europa. As a result, in both Canada and the U.S. today, there are only 600 speakers of both dialects, and most speakers are older adults. Although the majority of younger people cannot speak the language (particularly the Passamaquoddy dialect), there is growing interest in teaching the language in community classes and in some schools.
Status and revitalization
Maliseet-Passamaquoddy has a ranking of 7 on the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS); a 7 corresponds to "Shifting: The child-bearing generation can use the language among themselves, but it is not being transmitted to children." However, in spite of this bleak assessment, there are significant efforts to revitalize the language and teach both children and adults who did not learn the language natively.
Since 2006, a project known as Language Keepers, which attempts to document endangered languages and increase public group discourse in these languages, has worked with the Passamaquoddy and Wolastoqey communities and done extensive documentation of the language. In their first three years of work, they filmed over 50 hours of natural group conversation with 70 speakers, which led to eight DVDs in Maliseet-Passamaquoddy subtitled in English. According to the Peskotomuhkati-Wolastoqey Language Portal, this film "stimulated language revival programs for people who understand but cannot speak, and identified new sources of resiliency and leadership in the language-speaking community." Their approach to documentation has garnered praise, with Meg Holladay from Cultural Survival stating "In contrast to 'elicitation,' in which linguists ask speakers questions to learn about a language, Language Keepers videos show how the language works in practice, and have provided many "new" words for the dictionary. They also document traditional Passamaquoddy culture activities, like canoe-building, and views of the world."
In addition to the film, the Language Keepers project—along with other linguists and community activists—has helped compile the Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary. This dictionary, started in the 1970s by linguist Philip S. LeSourd, includes over 18,000 entries, many of which include audio and video files of native speaker pronunciations.
Along with the various resources available online, revitalization efforts have included Maliseet-Passamaquoddy class teachings at the University of New Brunswick to increase inter-generational communication and transmission of knowledge and culture.
Jeremy Dutcher, a Canadian classical singer from the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, has recorded two albums of music sung partially or entirely in Wolastoqey (Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (2018) and Motewolonuwok (2023)).Melody Lau, "Jeremy Dutcher's debut album blew up. His next one is even more ambitious". CBC Music, October 6, 2023.
Phonology and orthography
The Maliseet-Passamaquoddy standard orthography consists of 17 letters and an apostrophe. The following tables are based on the sound system described by Robert M. Leavitt in Passamaquoddy-Maliseet (1996). The bold letters are the spelling in the standard orthography, and the symbols between the slashes give the respective IPA pronunciation:
Consonants
Bilabial Alveolar Palatal Velar Labio-velar Glottal Nasal m n Plosive p t c k q Fricative s h Approximant l y w
Additionally, the standard orthography uses an apostrophe () to represent word-initial consonants that are no longer pronounced due to historical sound changes. It only occurs word-initially before p, t, k, q, s, or c. These "missing consonants" can appear in other forms of the word. For example, the stem produces the word 's/he is poor' (where the apostrophe indicates that the initial k has been dropped) as well as the word 'I am poor' (where the k remains pronounced because it occurs after the pronoun n-).
Vowels There are six monophthongs, five of which are spelled with a single letter and one which is spelled with the combination eh. There are also five diphthongs, which are spelled as a combination of a vowel and a glide.
+ Monophthongs Front Central Back High i u Mid e o Loweh a
When o appears before w, it is written as u to reflect the rounding of the vowel due to the influence of the w. may also be pronounced as . The sound represented by eh is an allophone of before an underlying .
+ Diphthongs Spelling Pronunciation aw ew iw ay ey
Phonological processes Many phonological processes that occur in Maliseet-Passamaquoddy, the most important of which are outlined below:
Several consonants have two allophones, which alternate depending on where they appear in the word. When they appear adjacent to another consonant or following an apostrophe, they use the default voiceless pronunciation given in the consonant chart above. When they appear only adjacent to vowels or the prefix n-, they use the voiced equivalent of the same sound. For example, in the word 'he/she arrives', c is voiced. But in the word 'far away', the c is unvoiced because it is adjacent to h. The voiced and unvoiced allophones of these consonants are as follows:
Consonant (orthography) Voiceless allophone Voiced allophone p t k q s c
Syncope of unstressed o is very common. This often occurs when o is in the first syllable of a verb stem used without a prefix. For example, in the word 'if s/he is poor' (from the verb stem ), the first o drops out because it is unstressed. But in 'I am poor', which is built off the same verb stem, the first syllable is stressed. Therefore, the first o is not dropped. There are other environments where this occurs, but the syncope changes are usually predictable. LeSourd describes many of the syncope rules in Accent and Syllable Structure in Passamaquoddy (1993). Verbs with o (or an underlying o that has undergone syncope) in the first syllable of their stem have an ablaut form in the Changed Conjunct mode, where the o changes to an e. For example, the verb stem ('smoke') becomes ('when he/she smoked'). With verb stems that end in h, the vowel preceding the h changes to match the first vowel in the inflectional ending that follows the stem. The vowel preceding the h is therefore left as a blank underscore when writing out the stem. In the following example, the verb stem is 'kill': 'I kill him/her' 'when you killed him/her' 'you kill me' 'he/she kills me' 'they kill me' The monophthongs (except "o") are lengthened when they occur in certain positions, although vowel length is not contrastive. One notable difference between the two dialects is that vowels are generally not as long in Passamaquoddy as in Maliseet, but the distribution of long and short vowels are similar. LeSourd describes the following generalizations about vowel lengthening: vowels are lengthened before a hC cluster but remain short before other consonant clusters vowels are lengthened in open penultimate syllables if that syllable is stressed or if the final syllable is stressed word final vowels are sometimes lengthened, especially when they occur before a pause
Distributional restrictions and syllable structure Every phoneme except "o" and "h" can occur initially, medially, or finally; "o" and "h" are never word final. Clusters of two obstruents, geminate consonant pairs, and clusters of a sonorant followed by an obstruent are all common. Consonant clusters ending in a sonorant usually do not occur except in geminate pairs or when they occur initially with one of the personal pronoun prefixes. Clusters of three consonants can occur and are almost always of the form CsC.LeSourd, Philip S. Accent and Syllable Structure in Passamaquoddy . 1993. New York: Garland Publishing.
The most basic and common syllable structures are CV and CVC.
Stress and pitch accent Stress is assigned based on a set of very complex rules, and a difference in stress and accent systems is one of the most prominent distinguishing features between Maliseet and Passamaquoddy. In Passamaquoddy, some vowels are considered stressable while others are not. Stressable vowels are available to be acted on by stress rules, while unstressable vowels might undergo syncope. Stress is assigned (to stressable vowels only) to initial syllables and even-numbered syllables, counting from right to left. There is a simultaneous left to right process that reassigns some unstressable vowels as stressable. Unstressable vowels which do not become stressable based on the left to right process are proposed to be subject to syncope based on five rules. Maliseet has a similar approach, but the finer details of the stress assignment rules are different.
In addition to stress rules, some rules assign pitch to some syllables based on their position in the words. Passamaquoddy stressed syllables can be relatively high-pitched or low-pitched, and final unstressed syllables can be distinctively low-pitched. Maliseet has slightly varied pitch assignments.
Morphology There are four categories of words in Maliseet-Passamaquoddy: nouns, pronouns, verbs, and particles; every type except particles are inflected. Like other Algonquian languages, Maliseet-Passamaquoddy is polysynthetic, often combining many morphemes into one-word unit. It is also fairly agglutinative, with many morphemes generally corresponding to a single unit of meaning.Bruening, Benjamin. (2001). Syntax at the edge: cross-clausal phenomena and the syntax of Passamaquoddy (Ph.D.). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Nouns A fundamental characteristic of Maliseet-Passamaquoddy is that all nouns and pronouns have noun classes: Like other Algonquian languages, nouns are either animate or inanimate. All abstract nouns (such as prayer, happiness, the past) are inanimate; people, personal names, animals, and trees are all animate. There is no perfect correspondence between the inherent "animateness" of a noun and its class for all words. However, the words for 'fingernail' and 'knee' are animate, but the words for 'heart' and 'tongue' are inanimate. Verbs impose restrictions on the noun class that one of their arguments must be. The easiest way to distinguish animate and inanimate nouns is by their plural forms. Animate plural nouns end in -k, and inanimate plural nouns end in -l.
In addition to class and number, animate nouns and pronouns (except 'I', 'we', and 'you') are marked in sentences as either proximate or obviative. Inanimate nouns are never marked as obviative. Proximate nouns refer to something near the speaker or most central to the discourse, while obviative nouns refer to something that is distanced or more remote from consideration. When two nouns or pronouns are conjoined, they can both be proximate or both obviative. In all other cases, when two or more animate nouns or pronouns appear in the same clause, one will be proximate (the focus of the clause), and the others will be obviative. Proximate is the "default" noun ending; obviative forms use different endings.