A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

determine what language is being referred to by these various labels. To complicate
matters further, Goddard in his discussion in the Handbook of North American Indians
lumps together various dialects spoken by Indian groups such as Ojibwa, Chippewa,
Saulteaux, Ottawa, Mississauga, Nipissing, and Algonquin under the label Ojibwa (see
Goddard 1978:583). 3 More recent classifications, however, have done away with the
general Ojibwa label preferring now the term Ojibwayan to describe these various
languages (Goddard 1996:4). In his foreword to the reprint edition of Baraga’s famous
“Otchipwe” dictionary, Nichols states that the “Otchipwe” language (Baraga’s term), or
as he generally refers to it, “Anishinaabemowin” is genetically related to about twenty-
five other languages within the Algonquian language stock and is one of the most
widespread of North American languages, being “spoken today in the United States in
Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin and in Canada in Manitoba, Ontario,
Saskatchewan, and Quebec” (Nichols foreword in Baraga 1992:v-vi).
Therefore, given that term Ojibwe (and its various spellings) is often used as a
blanket term to speak about a wide variety of related languages within the Algonquian
language family which are spoken across a wide geographical area within the United
States and Canada, it is important to distinguish the dialect being studied in this thesis
from this blanket term. I, therefore, am not using the term Ojibwe to refer to a group of
related Algonquian languages, nor am I suggesting that the description of “Ojibwe”
discourse markers in this thesis is representative of the discourse markers existing in
other “Ojibwa” dialects (although their functions and meanings may be quite similar).
3
In this article, Goddard states that he did this as a convenience measure for sake of discussion, but also
concedes that it was “clear that the conventional group labels just listed do not correspond well to the
linguistic divisions” (Goddard 1978:583).
4