Plains Algonquian

Plains Algonquian is the conventional name for the Algonquian languages of the North American Great Plains, among them Blackfoot, Cheyenne and Arapaho. It is an areal rather than a genetic grouping: their speakers lived near one another, but the languages share no single common ancestor distinct from other Algonquian tongues. They have changed markedly from reconstructed Proto-Algonquian in sounds and vocabulary.

At first European contact in the sixteenth century, the Cheyenne lived as settled villagers in Minnesota. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries pressure from neighbouring peoples drove them and the Arapaho west across the Missouri onto the plains.

There they took up nomadic bison hunting and horse culture, the Cheyenne passing horses on to the Lakota around 1730. Farther north and west, the Blackfoot occupied the grasslands of Montana and Alberta.