Free (the) Reference Grammars: Algic Edition

In the interest of aiding language enthusiasts, researchers and amateur linguists everywhere, it is time to once again to take count of some free resources that have been sprung from the hoosegow of academia.  If you recall, we already found a source for free reference grammars of Slavic languages. Today's posting will explore a much less documented group of languages: the Algic language family.

The who, you say? Algic is a language family of North America that combines the geographically large Algonquian family (of New England, Eastern Canada and the Midwest) with two outliers, Yurok and Miyot, in California.

Algonquian is the largest sub-division within Algic, and includes the first Native American languages encountered by Europeans. In fact, you can read the very first description of an Amerindian language in English, Roger William's A Key into the Language of America, which describes the speech of the Narragansett and related tribes of Massachusetts. The first part of the pdf is a brief biographical sketch of the man who wrote it. The linguist Francis O'Brien, whose papers can be found on his website, helps interpret William's work.

Out in the Great Plains is another Algonquian language, Ojibway. Native-languages.org has a nice list of web resources on this language and there is a collection of Gospel Hymns (with English translations) at the Gutenberg Project.

A great number of locations throughout the continent have names from Algonquian languages and you can read about their origins with another public domain book, The Composition of Indian Geographical Names by J. Hammond Trumbull


Innu, or Montagnais, is another Algonquian language spoken in Quebec and Labrador. At the Innu-aimun Website you can find everything from folk stories, scholarly papers and a trilingual dictionary.


The reference to Whorf's "linguistic relativity" made me vomit a little in my mouth, but once I swallowed that, this paper from Parkland College in Illinois provides some examples of Miami-Illinois, a gone-but-not-forgotten Central Algonquian language.

Speaking of language revitalization, the Yurok Language Project at UC Berkeley is working to document and preserve one of the Algonquian languages' distant, Californian cousins. They provide a basic grammar of Yurok on their website.

On a related note, there are two more public domain works at the Gutenberg Project which contain a wealth of legends, myths and stories from Algonquian-speaking tribes: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's Algic Researches (Part I and Part II) and Algonquian Legends of New England by Charles Godfrey Leland.