There was once a linguistic landscape of incredible diversity in North America. While the continent of Europe has three main language families — Romance, Germanic, and Slavic — Native American languages can be grouped into about 30 language families. One of the largest, with languages that at one time covered an area reaching all the way from New England to the Rocky Mountains, is the Algonquian family. Algonquian languages are still spoken in Canada and the northern U.S. Two of them — Cree and Ojibwa — are estimated to have over 50,000 speakers. But even the healthiest native languages need active support to ensure their survival.
The goal of the Algonquian Linguistic Atlas is "to make sure that the beautiful Algonquian languages and the cultures they embody will be heard and spoken by many more generations to come." It isn't just a repository of words and stories though. It is organized in a way that lets you explore the similarities and differences between the languages, and see how they are distributed by place.
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