Nominal Contact in Michif

This book explores the results of language contact in Michif, an endangered Canadian language that is traditionally claimed to combine a French noun phrase with a Cree verb phrase, and is hence usually considered a 'mixed' language. Carrie Gillon and Nicole Rosen provide a detailed account of the Michif noun phrase in which they examine issues such as the mass/count distinction, plurality, gender, articles, and demonstratives. Their analysis reveals that while parts of the Michif noun phrase have French lexical sources, and the language has certain features that are borrowed from French, its syntax in fact looks very much like that found in other Algonquian languages. The final chapter of the book discusses the wider implications of these findings: the authors argue that contact does not create a whole new language category and that Michif should instead be considered an Algonquian language with French contact influence; they also extend their analysis to other mixed languages and creoles. The book will be of interest to Algonquian scholars, formal linguists in the fields of syntax, morphology, and semantics, and to all those working on issues of language contact.

Carrie Gillon is Research Associate at the University of Manitoba, where she works on the syntax and semantics of understudied languages, particularly on the universality of certain syntactic structures. She has carried out research on a range of languages from different language families, including Squamish, Halkomelem, and Straits (Salish), Inuktitut (Eskimo-Aleut), Innu-aimun (Algonquian), Michif (Algonquian/French mixed language), Quechan (Yumana), Lithuanian (Baltic), and Turkish (Turkic).
Nicole Rosen is Associate Professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Language Interactions at the University of Manitoba. Her research focuses on the effects of language contact, particularly in the languages spoken in the Canadian Prairies. She is particularly interested in enclave and language transfer effects from minority languages on English and French, focusing on the sociophonetic level, and has created several large corpora of Prairies languages to study these effects. She is also interested in making linguistic research more accessible to the public and is currently working on a project seeking to enhance the visualization of linguistic variation and change.