User:Jomeara421/Ottawa Lead

Lead
Ottawa (also spelled Odawa) is a dialect of the Ojibwe language spoken in the original homeland of the Ottawa people in southern Ontario in Canada, and northern Michigan in the United States. Descendants of migrant Ottawa speakers also live in Oklahoma and Kansas. Ojibwe is spoken in a series of dialects spoken primarily in the area surrounding the Great Lakes as well as in the Canadian provinces of Québec, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, with smaller outlying groups in North Dakota, Montana, Alberta, and British Columbia.

Although Ottawa is one of the Ojibwe dialects that has undergone the most linguistic innovation, it is still mutually intelligible with other dialects and hence is part of the larger Ojibwe language complex. Ottawa speakers are concerned that their language is endangered as the use of English continues to increase. Ottawa is known to its speakers as Nishnaabemwin 'speaking the native language', corresponding to Anishinaabemowin in other Ojibwe dialects, with Daawaamwin 'speaking Ottawa' also recorded in some sources. Ottawa is written using an alphabetic system derived from the letters of English orthography adapted to Ottawa pronunciation.

Ottawa shares many characteristics with other dialects of Ojibwe, but has also undergone innovations that make it distinctive. Most notably, Ottawa is characterized by pervasive vowel syncope that deletes short vowels in metrically defined positions in a word. Other innovations in pronunciation, word structure, and vocabulary also differentiate Ottawa from other dialects of Ojibwe.

Distinguishing characteristics of Ottawa grammar include animate and inanimate noun gender, multiple categories of verbs that are dependent upon gender, verb inflections that correlate with verb subclasses and clause type, and complex patterns of word formation. Ottawa distinguishes two types of grammatical third person in sentences, proximate indicating an 'in focus' noun phrase, and obviative, indicating an 'out of focus' noun phrase. Ottawa sentences have relatively free word order compared to languages such as English; while sentences with verbs in initial position are preferred, all logically possible combinations of Verb, Subject and Object are possible.

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