The Michif language -- spoken by descendants of French Canadian fur traders and Cree Indians in western Canada -- is considered an "impossible language" since it uses French for nouns and Cree for verbs, and comprises two different sets of grammatical rules. Bakker uses historical research and fieldwork data to present the first detailed analysis of this language and how it came into being.

Peter BakkerResearcher, University of Aarhus, Denmark

"Bakker offers us here a thorough grammatical description of the hybrid Michif language, including a pointed discussion of the Ojibwe substratum in its Cree component. There are two well-organized indexes and a wealth of references and comparisons with other cases of linguistic mixtures worldwide."--Anthropological Linguistics |k No