Learn Michif on CD

[David Robertson]

There is a good free CD "Learn Michif by Listening" available by request
from Peter Bakker, Aarhus University, Denmark.  Just Google his home page &
email him.

I mention this because the sound files give a pretty good idea what the
French spoken by many fur-company employees (at the time when Chinook
Jargon was young) must have sounded like.  At the same time you can hear a
good deal of Cree, which was also spoken by some fur-trade people.

Michif is a language of some Metis communities in the USA & Canada.  Like
Chinook Jargon, it's a contact language, the result of two or more cultures
living in sustained and close proximity.  In the case of Michif, the result
of that contact wasn't a pidgin or creole like CJ, but instead a "mixed"
or "intertwined" language, where (roughly) the nouns are French and the
verbs are Cree.  Many of the Michif nouns sound very similar to Chinuk
nouns; I'll post a few examples soon.

I'm kind of interested in when Michif came into being, since that may have
happened about the same time that Chinuk was springing up.  Michif may or
may not have played a direct role in the birth of the Jargon.

Peter Bakker wrote an excellent book on Michif titled "A Language of Our
Own", which is a good read whether you're a linguist or not.

--Dave R

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