The Blackfoot language is an endangered Native American language with only about 3,000 fluent speakers remaining. Cultural communities who use this language are the Blackfoot tribe bands which are the North Piegan, the South Piegan, the Blood, and the Siksika who reside in the northern plains of Montana, Idaho, and Alberta, Canada (Redish and Lewis "Blackfoot Indian Fact Sheet"). Each tribe band has the same culture and uses the same language, however they differentiate politically. The overall Blackfoot tribe have always lived in the northern plains and were a successful hunting society, mostly hunting buffalo, which was their main game to hunt and survive off for its meat, skin and tool making.
As many Native American cultures, values are a foundation to their tribe, in regards to the Blackfoot tribe, key cultural values and …show more content…
The Blackfoot language is essentially composed of timeless verbs usually in present tense (Briggeman "Keeping a Language Alive"). The use of timeless verbs is also used to bring objects to life, in the Blackfoot language “everything you see, everything you look at, everything you sense is described via the language as an action. State of being and state of action, nothing is stationary, nothing is inanimate, nothing is dead but everything is alive” (Brown "Revitalizing the Blackfeet Language in Montana"). The making of everything animate aspect of the Blackfoot language is by far the most important, it is the way history and culture is kept within their language. Another aspect of the Blackfoot language is how relatively hard it is to translate their language into English for every phrase in Blackfoot is more or less a description of something, not just a single word, for example moose translates to “dark moving into the brush” (Briggeman "Keeping a Language Alive"). As you can see the translation also uses the timeless verbs as mentioned
As many Native American cultures, values are a foundation to their tribe, in regards to the Blackfoot tribe, key cultural values and …show more content…
The Blackfoot language is essentially composed of timeless verbs usually in present tense (Briggeman "Keeping a Language Alive"). The use of timeless verbs is also used to bring objects to life, in the Blackfoot language “everything you see, everything you look at, everything you sense is described via the language as an action. State of being and state of action, nothing is stationary, nothing is inanimate, nothing is dead but everything is alive” (Brown "Revitalizing the Blackfeet Language in Montana"). The making of everything animate aspect of the Blackfoot language is by far the most important, it is the way history and culture is kept within their language. Another aspect of the Blackfoot language is how relatively hard it is to translate their language into English for every phrase in Blackfoot is more or less a description of something, not just a single word, for example moose translates to “dark moving into the brush” (Briggeman "Keeping a Language Alive"). As you can see the translation also uses the timeless verbs as mentioned