Anishinabe

Anishinabe, self-designated Anishinaabemowin, reaches from the lower St Lawrence westward to Lake Winnipeg and the upper Mississippi. Its varieties include Algonquin, Ottawa, Ojibwe, Saulteaux and Oji-Cree, with no single dialect or orthography treated as standard.

By the early eighteenth century these dialects served as the trade lingua franca of the upper Great Lakes: a report of 1703 describes them in use from the Gulf of St Lawrence to Hudson Bay, and as the Huron declined during the 1700s Ottawa and other Anishinaabe varieties replaced the Huron language in intertribal commerce.

They were written in local Roman alphabets based on French and English spelling and in the Great Lakes Algonquian syllabics, a French-based syllabary shared with Fox and Potawatomi speakers.