Indian languages Indian tribes What's new on our site today!

Animate and Inanimate Nouns In Cree

On our Cree colors worksheet, you can see that some adjectives have two different forms in Cree--for example, the white rock is wâpiskâw, but the white bird is wâpiskisiw. That's because there is a distinction in Cree between animate and inanimate nouns.

Sponsored Links

If you're familiar with a European language like Spanish or French, nouns in those languages are divided by gender. In those European languages, adjectives describing masculine and feminine nouns have different endings. So if you want to use the word "old" to describe a man in Spanish, you say viejo, but if you want to describe a woman, you say vieja. For men and women, this is easy to remember, but for other nouns, you just have to remember their grammatical gender. In Algonquian languages like Cree, you use the same adjective and verb forms regardless of whether the subject is male or female. Instead, there are different word forms depending on whether the subject is animate or inanimate. All people and animals are considered animate in Cree, but for other nouns, you just have to remember whether they are animate or not--you probably wouldn't be able to guess that "feather" is animate and "river" is inanimate in Cree any more than you would be able to guess that "feather" is feminine and "river" is masculine in Spanish.

asinîy wâpiskâw (the rock is white)	pîyesîs wâpiskisiw (the bird is white)	asinîya wâpiskâwa (the rocks are white)	pîyesîsak wâpiskisiwak (the birds are white)
asinîy mihkwâw (the rock is red)	pîyesîs mihkosiw (the bird is red)	asinîya mihkwâwa (the rocks are red)	pîyesîsak mihkosiwak (the birds are red)

Back to the Cree language homepage
Back to the Native American worksheets homepage
Learn more about the Cree tribe

Indian culture Native American Cheyenne Shinnecock tribe Ataniel fiction Native American tattoos

Would you like to help support our organization's work with endangered American Indian languages?