The Menominee language (also spelled Menomini) is an Algonquian language spoken on the Menominee Nation lands in Northern Wisconsin in the United States.

Menominee is a highly endangered language, with only a handful of elderly speakers left. According to a 1997 report by the Menominee Historic Preservation Office, 39 people speak Menominee as their first language, 26 as their second language, and 65 others have learned some of it for the purpose of understanding the language and/or teaching it to others.

The main characteristics of Menominee, as compared to other Algonquian languages, are its heavy use of the low front vowel /æ/, its rich negation morphology, and its lexicon. Some scholars (notably Bloomfield and Sapir) have classified it as a Central Algonquian language based on its phonology.

The name of the tribe, and the language, Omāēqnomenew, comes from the word for wild rice, which was a staple of this tribe's diet for millennia. This designation for them (as Omanoominii) is also used by their Algonquian neighbors to the north - the Anishinaabe (Ojibwa).

For good sources of information on both the Menominee and their language, some valuable resources include Leonard Bloomfield's 1928 bilingual text collection, his 1962 grammar (a landmark in its own right), and Skinner's earlier anthropological work.

Phonology

Judging by Bloomfield's 1962 grammar and ^*, the phonology of Menominee is (with the transcription of some phonemes to their right; long vowels are generally written with a macron or diaresis):

External links

• Wisconsin Tribal Languages in Danger of Dying Out
• Menominee Language
• Ethnologue Report on Menomini
• Ethnologue list of nearly extinct languages
• The Meaning of the Menominee Myth of the Flood--in Relation to People Today