A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis

by Peter Bakker

The Michif language -- spoken by descendants of French Canadian fur traders and Cree Indians in western Canada -- is considered an "impossible language" since it uses French for nouns and Cree for verbs, and comprises two different sets of grammatical rules. Bakker uses historical research and fieldwork data to present the first detailed analysis of this language and how it came into being.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1997

Reviews

[Craig Rowland · Rating 3 out of 5]

I obtained A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis by Peter Bakker from the Windsor Public Library via our interloans service. I was inspired to read more about Michif after reading the juvenile book Lii Yiiboo Nayaapiwak lii Swer : l’Alfabet di Michif = Owls See Clearly at Night : a Michif Alphabet ten years ago. Bakker wrote an academic analysis of this intertwined language that mixes Cree and French (with some Ojibwe as well). This was not a lengthy academic read yet still took me over three weeks to finish. Academic reads are not written to be pleasure reading, a remark I have made in past book reviews, thus I realize the author’s intent was not to entertain me with a captivating page-turner. Nonetheless, although I found the 304 pages interesting as the subject matter is unique as a combined language, I still couldn’t get through more than ten pages in an hour. Repetition runs rampant in academic reads and this book was no exception. I have often felt that writers repeat themselves so often in attempt to pad their work. That said, although I hadn’t read any books about Michif aside from the juvenile title above, I felt that the scope of this book, published in 1997, provided the most thorough analysis of language history, formation, grammar, morphology, and current situation.

Note that in the excerpts of Michif I reproduced in my review of Lii Yiiboo Nayaapiwak lii Swer : l’Alfabet di Michif = Owls See Clearly at Night : a Michif Alphabet I had no problem identifying the French components. I realize now–and what I did not know at the time–was that these components were all nouns, articles and prepositions. Their Michif orthography resembled French. The Cree component in the title, Nayaapiwak, was a verb. With few exceptions all Michif verbs come from Cree. Bakker broke down the morphemes and inflections of Cree polysynthetic verbs and how they compare to those in Michif, so now that I have read the book I recognize the -wak ending as a plural marker.

I rarely took notes during my read; in fact I took more notes after reading the eighteen-page bibliography in search of other titles about mixed languages. The notes I did take indicated entire paragraphs, which neatly sum up the history and current state of the language. I use the author’s own words to highlight the characteristics of Michif:

“In summary, we can say that Michif is a mixed language of Plains Cree and French words plus a few English ones. The French and Cree elements are about evenly distributed. English words intrude into Michif because that is the language mostly used by speakers of Michif. Verbs, personal pronouns, and demonstratives are always Cree; nouns, numerals, and articles are always French. Michif verbs have the same complexity as the Cree verbs. Michif nouns are used and categorized as in French. Word order mostly follows Cree, that is, almost completely free, but order in noun phrases is like that in French. The agreement system of Michif combines the agreement systems of French (masculine or feminine) and Cree (animate or inanimate). French nouns are classified as animate or inanimate as if they were Cree nouns and showed the appropriate gender agreement in the verb. Michif adjectives from French are used as are French adjectives, Cree adjectives in the Cree way. Other categories associated with noun phrases, such as prepositions, are often French. Adverbs can be Cree or French. A very few words have French stems and Cree affixes. Cree and French lost very little of their complexity in Michif. Michif has two phonological systems, one for the Cree part and one for the French part, each with its own rules. The Cree part is almost identical with Plains Cree, and the French part is almost identical with the Métis French dialect, which is a derivative of eastern Canadian French dialects.”

Bakker tried to find the origin of the Michif language and the specific idioms of Cree and French used to form it. We learned of the early European settlements of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and North Dakota. The consensus is that Michif was “crystallized” as a language in the Red River Settlement by the early 1800’s, yet there is evidence that it may even be older. The dispersal of the Métis after 1812 ensured that the language structure was crystallized wherever they resettled:

“It is a so-called intertwined language spoken by the Métis people. The Métis are a consequence of the Canadian fur trade, during which European men married Amerindian women. Their children were bilingual, and they more or less combined the grammatical system of the mother’s language with the lexicon of the father’s. From this combination the Michif language emerged, a language with Cree verbs and French nouns.”

The most surprising phenomenon of speakers of Michif is that they generally do not speak either of its two intertwined components:

“If we consider these Michif speakers as a kind of ‘random selection’ (whereby every Michif speaker who was willing and able to work on the questionnaire was automatically selected), we arrive at the striking result that the great bulk of the Métis people who speak the mixture of Cree and French called Michif actually do not speak either of these languages in a nonmixed form. Virtually none of them speaks Cree, and only one in three speaks French.
“This is very strong evidence that Michif is not an ad hoc mixture because its speakers do not know the languages they are supposed to mix. It is not code switching or code mixing since one must be bilingual to switch between languages. What it is is a mixed language, with two clearly separate components. This mixture of Cree and French is not haphazard but very systematic.”

Bakker was pessimistic about the future of Michif, foreseeing its demise by now, since the book was published in 1997:

“If the attempts to save the language do not succeed, it will effectively die out within one or two decades, as its speakers have exchanged their language for the all-encroaching English. It will not have survived two centuries.”

In my review of The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages, I wrote:

“Language extinction–and its more dramatic synonym, language death–can get me more worked up and emotional than learning about the extinction of an animal species.”

I am not alone. In his final sentence, Bakker wrote about Michif:

“It is a matter of deep regret that human languages that are threatened with extinction–especially those as unique as Michif–do not receive as much attention as animals in the same situation.”

[Manybooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Within the context of reconciliation between Canada's First Nations and governments both federal and provincial, we unfortunately often do tend to forget about the Métis, albeit the Métis' extensive battles to right the abuses of the past (and especially regarding Louis Riel, about losing their lands and basic hunting rights), to have their important and necessary role in the building of Canada as a nation and as an economic (fur trading) power be officially recognised and also and importantly to save their unique and as such also linguistically really and majorly special mixed language of French and Cree (with a tiny bit of Ojibwe and English), to save Michif from extinction are (at least in my humble opinion) quite as all encompassing and as important as ANY AND ALL Native Canadian stories and scenarios of struggle are, and that yes, even though the Métis are a mixed race people (primarily French, with some Scottish/English and then of course Indigenous ancestry) and speak a mixed language, they do consider themselves and should also be considered as being part of Canada's First Nations.

Thus about Michif as a language and how it formed, how it came to exist, Peter Bakker's 1997 A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis (which is a reworking of Bakker's University of Amsterdam 1992 PhD dissertation) is not only brilliant and also truly pioneering, it also and equally represents a book which while academically quite dense in scope and breadth is generally readable enough even for individuals who do not have advanced university graduate level degrees and knowledge in linguistics.

Now in the introduction Peter Bakker states that his ultimate goal for A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis is to save Michif from extinction, from being forgotten and swept away. And while I do think that Bakker has generally speaking very nicely succeeded doing this with A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis, I do wish there could also be more less specifically linguistics inclined (and still geared towards an adult readership) tomes on Michif out there as well (as many if not the vast majority of basic, of simple books about michif seem to be picture books and thus of course first and foremost meant for children, although yes, Julie Flett does provide a very nice basic introduction to Michif as a language and to how it is pronounced in her brilliant and delightful Lii Yiiboo Nayaapiwak lii Swer: L'alfabet di Michif/Owls See Clearly at Night: A Michif Alphabet). For even though and as I have just mentioned above one does not require all that much advanced linguistic knowledge to enjoy and become enlightened by Peter Bakker’s featured text, yes, A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis does occasionally use rather complex jargon, is a primarily heavy duty language and language history based study and might therefore and sadly frighten off potential readers, even though Bakker in fact and very specifically points out in the chapters of A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis where he sketches the structural and the grammatical outline of Michif, its sound system, word formation, sentence structure, the contributions of both French and Cree to Michif and the specific ways in which they tend to interact with one another, that readers can skip directly to the summary at the end of the chapters in question and still receive a more than adequate general knowledge.

And A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis also shows the historical, social, cultural, economic and linguistic landscapes that that helped engender the Métis people and create their unique and original language, with readers discovering that the Métis are totally the product of the French Canadian fur trade, that they constitute an ethnic group with their own culture and history, and that they both recognise and celebrate their double European/First Nations ancestry equally, with their language, with Michif being a pretty much fifty/fifty and unique mixture of the languages of their paternal (mostly French) and maternal (primarily Cree) ancestors, with Michif presenting a complex language where the verbs, question words, demonstratives and personal pronouns are Cree and where the nouns, articles, almost all adjectives, most conjunctions and most prepositions are French, but just to say also in a manner representing how French was spoken by the original French settlers to what is now the Canadian province of Quebec (and yes, I have certainly noticed this with Michif texts I have read, that I can with my knowledge of French usually figure out nouns, but not so much verbs, and yes, it sure is interesting and also has been much academic fun for me to see this proven by Peter Bakker in A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis).

But while Bakker also showcases a number of other mixed languages (from Central/South America, Africa, Europe and Asia) in A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis (and no neither English nor Yiddish are mixed languages), Peter Bakker clearly textually demonstrates that Michif is totally and utterly unique as a mixed tongue in so far that both French and Cree are mixed equally in Michif and with neither French nor Cree being considered as dominant (just like the Métis themselves consider both their European and their First Nations backgrounds as equal as well), and with the final chapter of A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis providing both a concise summary and also the hope that A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis might help with mitigating and slowing down the loss of language, culture and traditions the Métis have endured and faced since the 19th century and that perhaps what Peter Bakker has written might also be enough to save or at least to help save Michif from oblivion and to make the language popular enough again to mount a linguistic comeback so to speak.

Five stars for A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis, highly recommended, and also a linguistics themed study and analysis that is both academic and intellectual in nature but is also and thankfully not something overly and exaggeratedly complicated and convoluted either, with Bakker actually striving to make the linguistics he is using in A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis generally speaking pretty nicely and easily understandable, and that for me A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis is therefore appreciatively and delightfully not ever a monograph closed with the proverbial (and frustrating) seven seals and only open for and to the academically initiated (and which is something really wonderful, as that kind of textual approachability is actually quite rare in books mostly and primarily about linguistics).