Talk:Mitchigamea

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Language family[edit]

I have undone a number of recent edits on this article regarding which language family Michigamea belonged to. The edits wrote that Michigamea was an Algonquian language, which disagrees with the (as far as I know) only significant published evidence regarding the language, that being an analysis of an 18th century Michigamea fragment and its identification by a Siouan language expert as belonging to the Mississippi Valley division of the Siouan language family. The previous claims in this article identifying Michigamae as an Algonquian language were unsourced, except for a vague reference to 20th century oral tradition (over which contemporary 18th-century documentation takes precedent); it also included some editorializing about the trustworthiness of modern researchers and their "motives" which is inappropriate for an encyclopedic reference work such as Wikipedia.

I concede that not a lot is known about the Michigamea and that the evidence for their being Siouan is not air-tight. However, unless somebody can find some recent and reliable works of scholarship (which are not original research) to the contrary, then the article should be in accordance with the most recent scholarship and the majority opinion of experts in the field. CMurdock (talk) 06:06, 14 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]