LWM 301: Oneida

Oneida

Clifford Abbott
University of Wisconsin - Green Bay

Oneida is an endangered language of the Iroquoian family of northeastern North America. Among its more notable structural features are: its relatively small phonemic inventory lacking in labials; its use of whispered syllables; the complexity of the verbal morphology; the dominance of verbal structures over nominal ones; and the productive use of noun incorporation.

The current work is based on two and a half decades of field work in the Wisconsin community of Oneidas where there are now fewer than a couple dozen native speakers remaining. Other communities exist in Ontario and New York state where the language is similarly endangered. Despite the endangered status there is an oral literature, primarily in the rich ceremonial tradition. The community actively invests in language revitalization efforts and there is limited literacy in an orthography not more than a few decades old.

Clifford Abbott is an associate professor in Information Sciences and in American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay. He has worked with the Wisconsin Oneida community since 1974 developing language revitalization materials. He has published articles on Oneida texts and structure as well as a dictionary in 1996.

Outline of Oneida Grammar:

Setting: related languages, the speech community
Phonology: phonemics, suprasegmentals, whispering
Morphology: word classes: formal and functional; verb morphology: prefix system, pronominal system, stem structure and stem classes, transitivity, tense\aspect suffixes, noun incorporation, noun morphology, possessive prefixes, suffixes, locatives, plurals, others particles: independent pronouns, interrogatives, adverbials, syntactic particles, discourse particles
Syntax: basic structures, complex structures
Text analysis
Charts: prefix system, pronoun system, verb structure, tense\aspect suffixes
Bibliography

ISBN 9783895865558. Languages of the World/ Materials 301. 60pp. 2000.