Ojibwe Discourse Markers by Brendan Fairbanks (review)

Abstract

Brendan Fairbanks’s book is a remarkable effort to discover and describe as complete a roster as possible of discourse markers in the Mille Lacs dialect of Ojibwe in east central Minnesota. He points out that “the topic of discourse markers in Ojibwe is largely unexplored” and that these markers “have not been the topic of much . . . discussion within the Algonquian literature” (p. 1). Ojibwe (or Anishnaabemowin, as it is called, with some variation, by Algonquianist linguists and mother-tongue speakers alike) is, of course (as Fairbanks reminds the reader), a multidialectical language within the Algonquian language family, one of the largest indigenous language families in North America (including such languages as Ojibwe, Algonquin, Cree, Odawa, and Blackfoot, among others). As Fairbanks notes early in the book, very few Algonquian communities are currently producing mother-tongue speakers of the language. One elder told him that only about 2 percent of the members of the Mille Lacs community speak the language fluently (out of a population of around four thousand), and all of those speakers are fifty years of age or older (p. 5). Fairbanks provides a detailed, comprehensive, and revelatory study of Ojibwe discourse markers in use in his community’s dialect. His primary goal is to provide “a descriptive piece with the intention of helping to preserve, document and revive the Ojibwe language” (p. 6). Further, he notes that one of his reasons for writing his book is the “decline in the number of native speakers” in his community (p. 5); another is to benefit the “growing number of second language speakers of Ojibwe” (p. 5). He writes, “while a long tradition of Algonquianist linguistics has brought to light many complex insights about the Ojibwe language as a whole . . . many aspects of Ojibwe remain unexplored and misunderstood” (p. 6). Ojibwe Discourse Markers seeks to remedy some of those misunderstandings. One of the striking features of Fairbanks’s book is his methodology. His data are not restricted to narratives, the common domain of discourse analysts, but includes “a number of recorded examples of discourse marker usage in real time within interactions between speakers themselves” (p. 7). Using examples from naturally occurring conversational interaction, Fairbanks’s analysis lays a foundation for discourse linguists to focus on features of talk rather than text. This is noteworthy, and sets Ojibwe Discourse Markers apart from previous studies. As J. Randolph Valentine notes, “Overwhelmingly, linguistic studies in Algonquian languages focus on formal linguistic patterns; the phoneme, the morpheme, the word, the sentence, or the text” (2001:281). Fairbanks’s book is groundbreaking in its recognition that language is most often used in real-life interaction and is not merely comprised of a set of grammatical rules and linguistic forms. After presenting his methodology and discussing orthographic issues, Fairbanks defines what he means by discourse analysis and details how discourse markers work in Mille Lacs Ojibwe. I found it fascinating to compare his analysis of discourse markers in Mille Lacs Ojibwe with the set of discourse markers I have studied for many years in the Algonquin language (Spielmann 1998). With only slight phonetic differences, the major discourse markers discovered and described by Fairbanks are virtually identical to Algonquin discourse markers such as minawa, onzaam, dibishkoo, mii and mii dash, da, bina, goda, and naa.