On December 5, 2016, the Biigtigong Nishnaabeg Chief and Council honoured the 19 individuals who contributed to the reconstruction of our Biigtigong dialect verb charts.
(You can learn more about each of the 19 verb chart contributors by reading the Verb Chart Contributor Profiles page.)
How we use verbs: The very heart of our language
Our Nishnaabe language consists mostly of verbs. And, the bazillions of different ways that we can change and transform our verbs can be considered the very heart of our language and of our Biigtigong dialect.
Verb charts are like a list of specific ways that we can speak our verbs in their thousands and thousands of different forms.
The 19 people who were honoured on December 5th each played an important role over the last three years in bringing these thousands and thousands of ancient Biigtigong verb forms back to life.
Gwiidookdaadmin: We are helping each other
The contributions of these 19 individuals also helped make it possible to, over the last ten months, reconstruct the relationship between Biigtigong’s verb charts and the verb charts of two other Algonquian languages – specifically the South Bay Odawa language and the Pokagon Potawatomi language.
We humbly hope that other Nishnaabe communities find these ‘bridging’ verb charts useful in their language reconstruction efforts.
We are planning to have the verb charts from all three of these languages available online in their finished and polished form by the end of January 2017. [added Jan. 5, 2018: Our Biigtigong Wjibwe verb charts and the Wdaawaa verb charts can be downloaded now.]
Our journey to the heart
Miigwech to Biigtigong’s 19 verb chart contributors whose collective journey has successfully brought back and protected the heart of our Biigtigong Nishnaabe language!
