The East Cree language is spoken in Northern Quebec, Canada, in the James Bay area; it belongs to the Algonquian language family. The East Cree Language Resources website is intended as a resource for Cree language teachers, literacy instructors, translators, linguists, and anyone who has an interest in the nuts and bolts of the East Cree language.
We hope that the live possibilities of the internet will encourage participation. We are seeking support form all who value linguistic diversity and want the Cree language to be alive and well in the 21st century and after. Started in 2000, the site has been growing ever since.
There are two major dialects of East Cree: the Southern and the Northern dialects, with their own standardized orthography. Some, but not all pages are available in both dialects, depending on whether its authors are Southern or Northern speakers. There is room in the databases to also include Inland and Coastal variations. Know that our intention is to find a balance between standardization and respect of speech diversity.
In the stories section, you can hear the language and in the texts subsection you can also read it in syllabics. We are restoring old tapes of Cree stories as well as collecting new ones. The stories database contains hundreds of stories and other oral material. Some of these are being transcribed and used for literacy training, others are also translated and made available for language documentation, dictionary examples and teaching Cree.
Send comments and questions to: marieodile.junker@carleton.ca