Michif

[Larry Trask]

Adam Hyllested writes:

>  I suppose Michif wasn't created overnight, which means that it is best
>  described as a language descended from EITHER French OR Cree - depending
>  on its prehistory. What do we know about earlier stages of Michif?

Not much: nobody was taking notes at the time.

But it's clear the language was created by a generation of people who were
fluently bilingual in Cree and in French (its modern speakers can speak
neither language, though they are now bilingual in English).

And we may reasonably surmise that Michif was created as an act of identity.
That is, for some reason its creators decided that they did not want to be
regarded either as Cree-speakers or as French-speakers, but as a quite
different group.  So they must have deliberately set about the job of
constructing a distinctive language for themselves.

Such acts of identity are far from rare, and a number of cases have been
reported in the literature.  But few such cases are as remarkable as Michif.
More usually, speakers content themselves with altering the form of a
single language, so as to make it different from the speech of another
group originally speaking the same language.  This is the process that
has been dubbed 'exoterogeny'.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk