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The general grammatical characteristics of Ojibwe are shared across its dialects. The Ojibwe language is polysynthetic, exhibiting characteristics of synthesis and a high morpheme-to-word ratio. Ojibwe is a head-marking language in which inflectional morphology on nouns and particularly verbs carries significant amounts of grammatical information.
The gender distinction in Ojibwe is not a masculine/feminine contrast, but is rather between animate and inanimate.Animate nouns are generally living things, and inanimate ones generally nonliving things, although that is not a simple rule because of the cultural understanding as to whether a noun possesses a "spirit" or not (generally, if it can move, it possesses a "spirit").
Ojibwe has a series of three short oral vowels and four long ones. The two series are characterized by both length and quality differences. The short vowels are /ɪ o ə/ (roughly the vowels in American English bit, bot, and but, respectively) and the long vowels are /iː oː aː eː/ (roughly as in American English beet, boat, ball, and bay respectively).
Word-internally long nasal vowels are represented by orthographic ny , as in Southwestern Ojibwe mindimooyenyag ' old women '. [ 23 ] The nasalized allophones of the vowels, which occur predictably preceding the nasal + fricative clusters ns, nz , and nzh are not indicated in writing, in words such as gaawiin ingikend an ziin "I don't know it ...
The exonym for this Anishinaabe group is Ojibwe (plural: Ojibweg). This word has two variations, one French (Ojibwa) and the other English (Chippewa). [8] Although many variations exist in the literature, Chippewa is more common in the United States, and Ojibway predominates in Canada, [9] but both terms are used in each country.
Severn Ojibwe, also called Oji-Cree or Northern Ojibwa, and Anihshininiimowin in the language itself, is spoken in northern Ontario and northern Manitoba.Although there is a significant increment of vocabulary borrowed from several Cree dialects, Severn Ojibwe is a dialect of Ojibwe. [16]
The word syllabary has two meanings: a writing system with a separate character for each syllable, but also a table of syllables, including any script arranged in a syllabic chart. Evans' Latin Ojibwe alphabet, for example, was presented as a syllabary.
Ojibwe word stems are formed with combinations of word roots (sometimes also called initials), and affixes referred to as medials and finals to create basic words to which inflectional prefixes and suffixes are added. Word stems are also combined with other word stems to create compound words.