Myaamia

Myaamia, better known as Miami-Illinois, is a Central Algonquian language of the Algic family, historically spoken across Illinois, Indiana, western Ohio and the upper Mississippi by the Miami, Wea and Piankeshaw and the tribes of the Illinois Confederation.

French missionaries gave it its earliest written form: Claude-Jean Allouez composed prayers and a catechism at Kaskaskia in the late seventeenth century, and Jacques Gravier compiled an Illinois-French dictionary of nearly six hundred pages and twenty thousand entries in the early eighteenth.

Warfare, disease and Anglo-American settlement thinned the Miami peoples after the late 1700s, yet documentation continued: the Miami chief Little Turtle's visit to Philadelphia produced wordlists, one said to have been commissioned by Thomas Jefferson, and a Wea primer for Protestant missionaries was printed in Kansas in 1837.