Interested in using your artistic skills for a language project?

We are currently developing a new worksheet series, Members of the Family. For this project, we will need pictures of faces for a family tree-- so we are putting a call out for Native artists interested in drawing some for us!

Send us an email at redish@native-languages.org if you are interested in working on this project. We need 12 faces, though we could probably be fine with 6 (male and female children, adults, and elders) as long as they have shirt or caps we could make different colors to tell the older and younger brothers apart and so on. :-)

Thanks!

Pennacook Language

Q: Hello. Not sure if I have the right person. But I was wondering how you say grandmother,  Nana in Pennacook.

Thank you

A:  Unfortunately the Pennacook language was never recorded. They may have been speakers of the Abenaki and/or Wampanoag languages, or they may have spoken their own Algonquian dialect of which we have no record. The Abenaki word for "grandmother" is Nokemes (pronounced no-kuh-muss.) Hopefully that is close enough for your purposes.

Have a good day!

Further reading:
Abenaki language
Wampanoag language
Pennacook Indian tribe   

Gros Ventre Dictionary

Q: Is there a detailed dictionary to learn the Gros Ventre language? If so, how can I get it?

A: There is no published Gros Ventre dictionary that we know of. Sorry! If you're good at linguistics, you could try this book, Arapaho Dialects. Gros Ventre is one of the Arapahoan languages discussed in that book. There is a lot of Gros Ventre vocabulary in there. It can be a little hard to understand if you're not familiar with linguistics, though.

You could also try contacting the Center for the Studies of the Indigenous Languages of the West. Last we heard, they were working on developing a Gros Ventre dictionary... but that was several years ago, so we have no idea of the status of that project.

Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas


Further reading:
Gros Ventre language
Gros Ventre Indians
American Indian dictionaries

Native American Language Classes in Denver?

Q: Hello - thanks for this site. I am having a difficult time finding someone in the Denver, Colorado metro area to help me learn a Native language. My family is Cherokee but I am interested in any language. I do not do well with self-learning, and would really love to have someone who can teach me a language. Can you help? Any thing that you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

A: Unfortunately it's really hard to find Native American language classes, especially off-reservation. The reason why most Native American language learning lessons are self-learning is that there are so few speakers of each language remaining compared to the general population of the US. The only Native American language course I was able to find in Colorado is a Navajo language class at Fort Lewis College. That's a heck of a commute from Denver.

Have you tried the Denver Indian Center? There are no language classes or language materials mentioned on their website, but they may have more things happening on an occasional basis than they publicize. Or they may have a member who's a fluent speaker of a Native American language, and could be persuaded to give some beginner's language lessons if you and a few other people were interested.

Anyone who knows any other language learning resources in the Denver area, please chime in with a comment!

There do exist some very good Cherokee audio courses. If language learning books and websites have not been working for you but you haven't yet tried an audio lesson, you could check out one of these two Cherokee language sets, each of which contains a book and accompanying CD set recorded by native speakers: Introduction to Cherokee and Beginning Cherokee.

Hope that helps, have a good day!
Native Languages of the Americas


Further reading:
Cherokee language learning
Native Americans in Colorado
Native American dictionaries