Chippewa Language - Number of Speakers

Number of Speakers

The Chippewa dialects have been the focus of many academic works, from William Whipple Warren and Fr. Frederick Baraga in the 19th century, Frances Densmore, Jan P. B. de Josselin de Jong, Charles Fiero, Earl Nyholm and John Nichols in the 20th century. However, the Chippewa dialect of Ojibwemowin has continued to steadily decline. Beginning in the 1970s many of the communities have aggressively put their efforts into language revitalization, but have only managed to produce some fairly educated second-language speakers. Today, the majority of the first-language speakers of this dialect of the Ojibwe language are elderly, whose numbers are quickly diminishing, while the number of second-language speakers among the younger generation are growing. However, none of the second-language speakers have yet to transition to the fluency of a first-language speaker.

In the summer of 2009, Anton Treuer of Bemidji State University conducted an informal survey of number of first-language speakers of the Chippewa dialects in Minnesota and Wisconsin in order to convene a language session to address the need of vocabulary associated with math and sciences. Together with other Reservations that were not surveyed, Treuer estimates only around 1,000 first-language speakers of the Chippewa dialect in the United States.