Blackfoot, also called Niitsíʼpowahsin () or Siksiká ( ; , ), is an Algonquian language spoken by the Blackfoot or people, who currently live in the northwestern plains of North America. There are four dialects, three of which are spoken in Alberta, Canada, and one of which is spoken in the United States: / (Blackfoot), to the southeast of Calgary, Alberta; / (Blood, Many Chiefs), spoken in Alberta between Cardston and Lethbridge; / (Northern Piegan), to the west of Fort MacLeod which is Brocket (Piikani) and / (Southern Piegan), in northwestern Montana.Frantz "The Blackfoot Language" The name Blackfoot probably comes from the blackened soles of the leather shoes that the people wore.Gibson 2003
There is a distinct difference between Old Blackfoot (also called High Blackfoot), the dialect spoken by many older speakers, and New Blackfoot (also called Modern Blackfoot), the dialect spoken by younger speakers.Bortolin & McLennan 1995 Among the Algonquian languages, Blackfoot is relatively divergent in phonology and lexicon.Mithun 1999, p. 335 The language has a fairly small phoneme inventory, consisting of 11 basic consonants and three basic vowels that have contrastive length counterparts. Blackfoot is a pitch accent language.Frantz 2017, p. 3 Blackfoot language has been declining in the number of native speakers and is classified as either a threatened or endangered language, depending on the source used.
Like the other Algonquian languages, Blackfoot is considered to be a polysynthetic language due to its large morpheme inventory and word internal complexity.Aikhenvald 2007, p. 5 A majority of Blackfoot morphemes have a one–to–one correspondence between form and meaning, a defining feature of agglutinative languages. However, Blackfoot does display some fusional characteristics as there are morphemes that are polysemous.Armoskaite 2011, p. 16 Both noun and verb stems cannot be used bare but must be inflected.Frantz 2017, p. 7 Due to its morphological complexity, Blackfoot has a flexible word order.
The Blackfoot language has experienced a substantial decrease in speakers since the 1960s and is classified as "definitely endangered" by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. In Canada, this loss has been attributed largely to residential schools, where Indigenous students were often punished severely for speaking their first languages. Widespread language loss can also be attributed to the Sixties Scoop, through which thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their families, often without parental consent, and relocated by the government into non-Indigenous families. As a result of these losses, the Blackfoot community has launched numerous language revitalization efforts, include the Piikani Traditional Knowledge Services and many more.
Language variations
Dialects The four main Blackfoot dialects are Siksiká (), Káínai (), Aapátohsipikani ), and Aamsskáápipikani (). Some words are different in each dialect, for example: potato, in the Kainai dialect is but in Piikani dialect is , and another example: coffee, in Blackfoot dialects in Canada, is but in the Aamsskáápipikani dialect is .
Siksiká / ᓱᖽᐧᖿ Aapátohsipikani (Piikáni) / ᖳᑫᒪᐦᓱᑯᖿᖹ (ᑯᖿᖹ) Káínai / ᖿᐟᖻ Aamsskáápipikani / ᖳᐢᐧᖿᑯᑯᖿᖹ English Maatááki Paatááki Maatááki Paatááki Potato Niitáʼpaisiksikimi Niitáʼpaisiksikimi Niitáʼpaisiksikimi Áísiksikimi Coffee Siksikimi / Áísoyoopoksiikimi Siksikimi Siksikimi Áísoyoopoksiikimi Tea There is also minor grammatical and phonological differentiation between dialects.
Old and New Blackfoot During language revitalization courses educators frequently had situations where the Blackfoot the students learnt from their older relatives was different from the modern Blackfoot they were being taught. The modern variety's words are usually contracted compared to the older varieties. Old BlackfootNew BlackfootEnglishnitáʼpaisiksikimi nitáʼpsiksikimi coffeenomohtoʼtoonitohtoʼtoo / nitomohtoʼtoo / nimohtoʼtooI arrive [from somewhere] or I am fromaikííwatsiksiáíkiiwaWhat is she doing?nitáákiiyiniistóówa áákiiwaI am a woman
Written and spoken Blackfoot Some words are written in their uncontracted forms while in everyday spoken speech they are instead presented in their contracted forms, these spoken aside from being contracted are also less morphologically compositional than their written forms. Written BlackfootSpoken BlackfootEnglishtsá anistapiiwa?tsistapii?What is it?kitákitamáttsin!kiátamáttsin!Good bye! [See you later!]nitáákitapootáákitapooI am going there
Classification
Blackfoot is a member of the Algonquian language family belonging to the Plains areal grouping along with Arapaho, Gros Ventre, and Cheyenne. Blackfoot is spoken in Northwestern Montana and throughout Alberta, Canada, making it geographically one of the westernmost Algonquian languages.
History The Blackfoot people had been one of many Native American nations that inhabited the Great Plains west of the Mississippi River. The people were bison hunters, with settlements in what is now the northern United States and southern Canada. Forced to move because of wars with neighboring tribes, the Blackfoot people settled all around the plains area, eventually concentrating in what is now Montana and Alberta. Blackfoot hunters would track and hunt game, while the remaining people would gather food, and other necessities for the winter. The northern plains, where the Blackfoot settled, had harsh winters, and the flat land provided little escape from the winds. The Blackfoot Nation thrived, along with many other native groups, until the European settlers arrived in the late eighteenth century. The settlers brought with them horses and technology, but also disease and weapons. Diseases like smallpox, foreign to the natives, decimated the Blackfoot population in the mid-nineteenth century. Groups of Blackfoot people, such as Mountain Chief's tribe, rebelled against the Europeans. But in 1870, a tribe of peaceful Blackfoot were mistaken for the rebellious tribe and hundreds were slaughtered. Over the next thirty years, settlers eradicated the bison from the Great Plains. This took away the main element of the Blackfoot economy and the people's ability to be self-sustaining. With their main food source gone, the Blackfoot were forced to rely on government support.
In 1886, the Old Sun Residential School opened on the Siksika Reserve in Alberta. In 1908, it was described by an official survey as "unsanitary" and "unsuitable in every way for such an institution". Regardless, it remained operational until its closure in 1971. Dozens of Blackfoot children died while attending. The school was rife with physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, which left a lasting impact on the Blackfoot children who attended. The trauma endured by students, as well as the subsequent repression of their Indigenous language and culture, has been credited, in part, with the loss in the number of Blackfoot speakers.
Phonology
Consonants Blackfoot has nineteen consonants, of which all but , , and form pairs distinguished by length. One of the two affricates is unusual for being heterorganic. Blackfoot has several allophones: for example, has many allophones. is an allophone of when it occurs after or . And is an allophone of when it occurs at the beginning of a word.
LabialCoronalDorsalGlottalNasal Plosive Affricate Fricative Approximant
phonemic velars become palatals after front vowels /t͡s, k͡s, k͡sː/ are phonetically considered affricates
Vowels
Monophthongs Blackfoot has a vowel system with three monophthongs, .Frantz 2017, pp. 1–2 FrontCentralBackHigh Low The short monophthongs exhibit allophonic changes as well. The vowels and are raised to and ~ respectively when followed by a long consonant. The vowel becomes in closed syllables.
Diphthongs There are three additional diphthongs in Blackfoot. The first diphthong ai is pronounced before a long consonant, (or , in the dialect of the Blackfoot Reserve) before or , and elsewhere is pronounced in the Blood Reserve dialect or in the Blackfoot Reserve dialect. The second diphthong ao is pronounced before and elsewhere. The third diphthong oi may be pronounced before a long consonant and as elsewhere.Frantz 2017, p. 2
Length Length is contrastive in Blackfoot for both vowels and consonants. Vowel length refers to the duration of a vowel and not a change in quality. The vowel is therefore the same sound as only differing in the length of time over which it is produced.
| /
|'he will rope' |- | /
|'she will sponsor a Sundance' |} Consonants can also be lengthened with the exception of , , and .
| /
|'one hundred' |- | /
|'my father' |- | /
|'he is good'
Pitch accent Blackfoot is a pitch accent language and it is a contrastive feature in the language. Every word will have at least one high pitched vowel or diphthong but may have more than one. Note that high pitch here is used relative to the contiguous syllables. Blackfoot utterances experience a gradual drop in pitch therefore if an utterance contains a set of accented vowels the first will be higher in pitch than the second but the second will be higher in pitch than the syllables directly surrounding it. Pitch is illustrated in the Latin-script orthography with an acute accent.
|'it's an arrow'
|'it's a fig'
|'s/he's not resting'
Phonological rules Blackfoot is rich with morpho-phonological changes. Below is a limited sample of phonological rules.
Semi-vowel loss Glides are deleted after another consonant, except a glottal stop, or word initially but kept in other conditions.Frantz 2017, p. 155
| loss
!→
| loss
!→
|word-initial
!→
Accent spread Accent will spread from an accented vowel to the following vowel across morpheme boundaries.Frantz 2017, p. 157
|→
|'s/he runs'
|→
|'shoes'
Vowel devoicing At the end of a word, non-high pitched vowels are devoiced, regardless of length.Frantz 2017, p. 5
Grammar
Lexical categories Lexical categories in Blackfoot are a matter of debate in the literature, with the exception of nouns and verbs. Additional proposed categories, proposed by Uhlenbeck, are adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, and particles.Uhlenbeck (1938) Taylor classifies the Blackfoot language as having two major classes, substantives (nouns and pronouns) and verbs, with one minor class consisting of particles.Taylor (1953) Frantz classifies adjectives and adverbs as affixes but not independent classes.Frantz 2017, p. 23
Agreement Agreement morphology is extensive in Blackfoot and agreement morphemes are often fusional, i.e. animacy and number (nouns) or person and number (verbs) are indicated within the same affix.
Animacy All nouns are required to be inflected for animacy and are classified as either animate or inanimate. Verbs are inflected to agree in animacy with their arguments. Animacy in Blackfoot is a grammatical construct for noun classification. Therefore, some semantically inherently inanimate objects, such as drums and knives, are grammatically animate.Frantz 2017, pp. 7–10
Verbs are marked with a transitivity marker which must agree with the animacy of its arguments. Even in stories in which grammatically inanimate objects are markedly anthropomorphized, such as talking flowers, speakers will not use animate agreement markers with them.
Number All nouns are required to be inflected as either singular or plural. Verbal inflection matches the number of its arguments.
Person marking Blackfoot has five grammatical persons – first, second, third (proximate), fourth (obviative), and fifth (sub-obviative).
Word order