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Relexification in Canada: The Case of Métif (French-Cree)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Peter Bakker
Peter Bakker*
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam
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Extract

Métif is a language spoken in the Canadian prairie provinces and the American prairie states bordering Canada. There are probably between 3000 and 5000 people who speak Métif as their first language, most of them of advanced age. They are living mostly in scattered Métis settlements. The Métis are a nation of mixed Amerindian and European descent. From the 17th century on French Canadian fur traders and voyageurs travelled west-wards from French Canada. Many of them married Amerindian women, who were often Cree speaking. Around 1860 the Métis were the largest population group of the Canadian West, many of them multilinguals. From the first decades of the 19th century the Métis started to consider themselves as a separate ethnic group, neither European nor Amerindian (see e.g., Peterson and Brown 1985). The Métis are still a distinct people. The Métis nowadays often speak Cree, Ojibwa, Métif, French and English or a combination of these. They often speak particular varieties of these languages. Not only is the French spoken by the Métis markedly different from other North American French dialects the language called Métif is uniquely spoken among the Métis people. For more information on Métif and Métis languages, see the publications listed in Bakker (1989).

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , September 1989 , pp. 339 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1989

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