This descriptive reference grammar of Nishnaabemwin (Odawa and Eastern Ojibwe), a major dialect group within contemporary Ojibwe spoken in the vicinity of Lake Huron in Southern Ontario, represents the most comprehensive works on an Algonquin language published to date. It includes extensive descriptive treatment of phonology, orthography, inflectional morphology, derivational morphology, and major structural and functional syntactic categories. Points of grammar are copiously illustrated with example sentences indexed with thorough grammatical annotations. An extensive glossary of standard Algonquian linguistic terms is also provided.

Written for both the beginning linguist as well as the scholar of Algonquian languages, this grammar provides simple explanations of linguistic terms as well as a thorough and comprehensive study of the language. Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar represents a major contribution to linguistics in general and to Algonquian language study in particular.

J. Randolph Valentine is Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies and Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

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