MultiTree:

Name: Gros Ventre Type: Language Alternate Names: Gros Ventres; Atsina; White Clay People; Ahahnelin; Ahe; Fall Indians; Ananin; Aáni; Northern Arapaho; Arapaho-Atsina Spoken in: USA Number of speakers: 10 (1977 SIL), decreasing. Very few semispeakers in 2000 (2001 I. Goddard). Ethnic population: 80 (2000 census) (Ethnologue) Number of speakers: 10 (UNESCO) Number of speakers: 10 (World Oral Literature Project) Code: ats Code Standard: ISO 639-3 Documentation: SIL Families: Algic (Algonquian-Wiyot-Yurok, Algonquian-Ritwan) Parent Subgroup: Arapahoan; Arapaho; Arapahoan Isolate (arho) Brief Description: "Gros Ventre (Atsina), a moribund Algonquian language of the High Plains, is closely enough related to Arapaho so that speakers of the two languages could to some extent understand each other. It is the heritage language of approximately 1,000 Gros Ventre who live on the Fort Belknap Reservation in north-central Montana, which they share with the Siouan Assiniboine. The Gros Ventre allied with the Blackfoot in the eighteenth century, by which time early vocabularies show that their language was already differentiated from Arapaho. (They are occasionally confused with the completely unrelated Hidatsa, whom the French also called Gros Ventre, apparently because the symbols for the two tribes in Plains Indian Sign Language are quite similar.) Fewer than ten elderly first-language speakers remain, none of them fully fluent; the last traditional speaker died in 1981." Victor Golla, Atlas of the World's Languages 2007 pg. 15

Endangerment Status

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UNESCO Status: Critically endangered Ethnologue Status: Nearly Extinct Sutherland's Red List: Critically Endangered