Central Algonquian

Central Algonquian is a geographical rather than a genetic grouping of Algonquian languages, spread around the Great Lakes and through the eastern interior of North America. Its best-known members are Cree, a chain of boreal-forest dialects reaching from Labrador toward the Rocky Mountains; Anishinaabe or Ojibwe, the tongue of the lake country from Quebec to Minnesota; Miami-Illinois and Shawnee.

These polysynthetic languages served both hunting bands and farming towns and had no alphabet of their own. From the 1600s French missionaries and fur traders were the first to write them down, leaving wordlists and mission grammars for Illinois and Ojibwe, while Cree and Shawnee lived on chiefly as spoken traditions.