Because the language was historically an oral language, not written down, there is no standard grammar shared by all the varieties of Anishinaabemowin. Some speakers write in a kind of English folk phonetics. The roman orthography used here is only one of the many possible writing systems for Anishinaabemowin.
Devised by Charles Fiero, the Double Vowel writing system has won wide acceptance among language teachers in the U.S. and CA. The main principles underlying it are that the letters or combination of letters, although drawn from the same alphabet used to write English, stand for Anishinaabemowin sounds, not English sounds, and that only the basic sounds of the language are written.
There are few single-word equivalents in English for Anishinaabemowin verbs of motion. Most types of motion are represented not by a general verb but by a word part, which combines with another word part or parts having directional or descriptive meaning. For example, there is no general word equivalent to English “run” but rather a set of verb stems describing specific ways of running, all containing a common word part meaning “run” as in biijibatoo “run here”, gizhiikaabatoo “run fast”, and maajiibatoo “start off running”. The subject and situation must always be considered before the appropriate translation can be selected.
Many speakers of Anishinaabemowin adopt English capitalization and punctuation conventions. Writers of Anishinaabemowin should feel free to follow English conventions of capitalization (capitalize names of nationalities, days of the week, months, spirits and deities, etc.) and punctuation if they find them helpful.
The major classes of words in Anishinaabemowin are verbs, nouns, pronouns, and particles. The verbs and nouns occur in a number of sub-classes, each coded differently and using a particular set of inflections. Several kinds of pronouns exist, some with inflected forms. Particles are uninflected words and can be divided into many sub-classes depending on their structure and the way they are used in sentences. Major word-building prefixes called preverbs are not a separate word by itself.