The names are a trap for the unwary reader, and worth setting out plainly. Ojibwe, Ojibwa and Ojibway are three spellings of one word. Chippewa is the same word again, worn down in the mouths of English speakers and fixed in United States treaties, which is why many band names in Minnesota and Wisconsin carry it. Saulteaux names the western communities. Anishinaabemowin is what speakers call the language themselves, from Anishinaabe, the people. The atlas holds them as one entry because they are one language, and lists the rest as aliases.
It is Algonquian, in the central group, and it forms a continuum rather than a set of separate tongues. Algonquin in Quebec, Odawa in southern Ontario and Michigan, Southwestern Ojibwe in Minnesota and Wisconsin, Saulteaux on the plains and Oji-Cree in the north shade into one another, and neighbouring varieties are mutually intelligible while the ends of the chain are not.
The grammar is polysynthetic and verb-centred, and one feature of it carries theological weight. Ojibwe sorts every noun into animate or inanimate, and the sorting is not what an English speaker would guess. Manidoo is animate. So are the sun, thunder, tobacco, and certain particular stones and kettles. The category is not a grammatical accident laid over a neutral world; it is a statement about what kind of thing can act.
Two writing systems are in use: a Latin double vowel orthography, standard in the United States and much of Ontario, and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics in the north and west.