Passamaquoddy language
| Malecite–Passamaquoddy | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Canada; United States |
| Region | New Brunswick; Maine |
| Ethnicity | 5,500 Maliseet and Passamaquoddy (2010) |
|
Native speakers
|
600 (2007 – 2011 census) |
|
Algic
|
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | male1292 |
Distribution of Maliseet and Passamaquoddy peoples.
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Malecite–Passamaquoddy (also known as Maliseet–Passamaquoddy) is an endangered Algonquian language spoken by the Maliseet 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: Malecite, 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 accent. Malecite-Passamaquoddy was widely spoken by the indigenous people 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. 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.
The Malecite-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 in square brackets give the respective IPA pronunciation:
Additionally, the standard orthography uses an apostrophe (') to represent word-initial consonants that are no longer pronounced due to historic sound changes. It occurs only 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 ktomakéyu produces the word 'tomakéyu "s/he is poor" (where the apostrophe indicates that the initial k has been dropped) as well as the word nkótomakey "I am poor" (where the k remains pronounced because it occurs after the pronoun n-).
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