It’s a special pleasure to announce the long-awaited publication of this first ever attempt at a dialect atlas of Cree and Ojibwe in Manitoba. The work of Brandon University Professor Emeritus Paul H. Voorhis, it’s an understatement to call this book a treasure. A full formal book announcement from Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics (its publisher) appears along with ordering instructions below.
Voorhis (still living in Brandon today) was a soft-spoken mainstay of the Brandon University Northern Teacher Education Program (BUNTEP). In the process of preparing teachers for the north, he worked closely with many students who spoke Cree and Ojibwe as their first languages. As a linguist, he was acutely aware of speech differences amongst students from different communities, and began to apply the tools of his discipline to document and catalog those variations. He created a questionnaire: 78 sentences in English that – once translated – would highlight the students’ variations. Next, he invited student speakers – up to four from each community – to translate the sentences, recording them on cassette tape. Then he began to play what he calls “the game of dialect geography”: listening, sorting, categorizing, and, ultimately, creating the meticulous hand-drawn maps that document the community-to-community variation he had heard. (The book includes all of his maps and diagrams, as well as the original questionnaire: a roadmap for the next generation?)
The map featured above (Map C2, page 15) captures the division of Cree dialects that use the th-sound (in northwest Manitoba, written here as θ) from those that use the n-sound (elsewhere).
Ordering instructions:
In preparing this post, I also discovered a great overview of BUNTEP: an arc-gis story prepared on behalf of the Rideau Hall Foundation. It even includes a list of program graduates from 1975 to the present (including Ernest Monias in 1982!)
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/38edae2e292248c1b1e58b88bb066cf8
