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Development of a bilingual lexical database and grammatically analyzed corpus of Michif, a highly endangered Indigenous contact language spoken by fewer than 100 members of the Métis Nation, primarily in small, diasporic communities across a vast area of western Canada and the northern USA. 

Michif [crg] is a highly endangered Indigenous contact language spoken by fewer than 100 members of the Métis Nation, primarily in small, diasporic communities across a vast area of western Canada and the northern USA. As the result of historical multilingualism involving both Algonquian and French languages, Michif interweaves grammatical and lexical elements from both language families into a single, complex system, showing little of the linguistic simplification often associated with the outcomes of language contact. Through linguistic consultation with Michif speakers, this project aims to develop a bilingual lexical database and grammatically analyzed corpus of Michif based on a seminal dictionary of the language. The resulting digital resources will result in much improved long-term access to a central resource for studies of Michif, as well as a much clearer view on the outcomes of language contact in a typologically exceptional and critically endangered contact language.