The Cree language (in Plains Cree, nêhiyawêwin) is spoken by about fifty thousand people in six Canadian provinces and territories and in the state of Montana. A member of the Algonquian family of languages, it is closely related to the Montagnais language of Quebec and Labrador, from which it separated at least five hundred years ago, and more distantly to Ojibwa (Chippewa), Shawnee, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Micmac, Delaware, and others; speakers of these other languages may sometimes recognize individual Cree words but cannot understand whole sentences, nor can Cree speakers understand the languages these other people speak.
Cree has a relatively simple sound system compared with other languages of the world. Most Cree dialects have only ten distinct consonants: p, t, k, and c (which varies in pronunciation from ts as in cats to (t)ch as in catch); s and h; m and n; and w and y. Most have seven vowels: short a, i, and o and long â, ê, î, and ô. Eastern dialects also have the consonants (English sh), and some dialects also have r, l, or ð (th as in this).
Five dialect divisions can be identified by their pronunciation of certain words. The Atikamekw dialect of southwestern Quebec has r in words like iriniwak, "people," and kîr, "you"; Moose Cree, at the southern end of James Bay, has l, as in ililiwak and kîla; Swampy Cree, spoken by many people in northern Ontario and Manitoba, substitutes n, as in ininiwak and kîna; the Woods Cree dialect of northwestern Manitoba and northeastern Saskatchewan has ð (th), as in iðiniwak and kîða; and Plains Cree, spoken by a large number of people across Saskatchewan and Alberta, and in neighboring parts of the Northwest Territories and Montana, substitutes y, as in iyiniwak and kîya. The dialects also sometimes use different words to express the same idea, and in some cases have different inflections and sentence structures. The examples that follow are drawn from Plains Cree.
English distinguishes first person (I; plural we), second person (you), and third person (he, she, it; plural they). However, English we is ambiguous: it may mean "you and I" ("We're friends, aren't we?") or "I and they" ("We're going, but you must stay"). Cree has two distinct forms: the inclusive kîyânaw, "we (you and I)," and the exclusive nîyanân, "we (but not you)." In the second person Cree has two separate pronouns: kîya, "you (singular)," and kîyawâw, "you (plural)." Some speakers of English similarly contrast you (singular) and youse or you-all (plural).
In the third person singular, English has three categories—he, she, and it—but he and she refer only to humans and a few other nouns. In French and Spanish all nouns are either masculine (he) or feminine (she); in Cree all nouns are either animate (he, she) or inanimate (it). Nouns referring to humans and other animals are inherently animate in gender; also animate are words for trees and some other plants (e.g., corn, tobacco, raspberries), and, unpredictably, a few other words (e.g., kettle, smoking pipe, fingernail, snowshoe, car). All other nouns are inanimate in gender.
The animate/inanimate gender distinction is fundamental to Cree grammar: there are separate verb stems and different inflections for intransitive verbs depending on the gender of the subject; for example, ayôskanak wîhkitisiwak, "raspberries taste good," but otêhimina wîhkasinwa, "strawberries taste good" (-w- is the third-person ending on intransitive verbs, and -ak and -a indicate animate and inanimate plural, respectively). Transitive verbs have different stems depending on the gender of the direct object, and different inflections to indicate every possible combination of subject and object; for example, ayôskanak niwîhkispwâwak, "I like the taste of raspberries," but otêhimina niwîhkistên, "I like the taste of strawberries."
In Cree only one third-person participant in a sentence (and, often, in a whole paragraph) can be treated as central. All other third-person participants are marked as obviative, a category sometimes called "the other third person" or even "fourth person." For example, if we are talking about a boy and his dog, the boy will be third person (as in English) but the dog will be obviative, as in otêma, "his dog" (-a indicates the obviative), or nâpêsis kî-wâpamêw anihi atimwa, "the boy [nâpêsis] saw that dog [atimw-]"; simply by changing the ending on the verb—nâpêsis kî-wâpamik anihi atimwa—we can reverse the meaning to "that dog saw the boy." If we were focused on the dog rather than the boy, we could also say atim kî-wâpamêw anihi nâpêsisa, "the dog saw that boy (obviative)"—or anihi nâpêsisa kî-wâpamêw or anihi kî-wâpamêw nâpêsisa, "he saw that boy," since Cree word order is quite free.
The obviative allows Cree to avoid some of the ambiguities inherent in a language like English. As soon as it is clear in a discourse which participant is third person and which is obviative, the nouns can be omitted: after saying nâpêsis kî-wâpamêw anihi atimwa, "the boy saw that dog," for instance, we could add ê-kî-pimipahtâyit wîkihk, "he was running along by his house"; the ending -yit shows that the subject of the verb "run" is obviative (the dog), whereas the form wîkihk, "his house," instead of wîkiyîhk shows that the house is the boy's, not the dog's.
Like all other indigenous languages of North America, Cree is in danger of extinction: the number of Cree speakers has been declining in recent years as many children grow up speaking only English. Some schools have introduced Cree language programs, but typically only a few hours a week are devoted to Cree; the rest of the time the children hear and speak English at school, and at home they watch English-language television. However, in the more remote communities at least, there are still children learning Cree as their mother tongue, so it is likely to survive as a spoken language for the foreseeable future.
See also
Languages.
Freda Ahenakew, Cree Language Structures: A Cree Approach (Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications, 1987); Freda Ahenakew, ed., Wâskahikaniwiyiniw-âcimowina / Stories of the House People told by Peter Vandall and Joe Douquette (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1987); H. C. Wolfart, Janet F. Carroll, and Freda Ahenakew, Meet Cree: A Guide to the Cree Language rev. ed. (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981).
David H. Pentland
University of Manitoba
