Iroquoian languages

Pre-contact distribution of the Iroquoian languages

The Iroquoian languages are a Native American language family. The family includes the languages of the Iroquois Confederacy (including the extinct Huron language), as well as Cherokee.

Every language in this family has at least one nasal vowel phoneme. Cherokee's is a nasal schwa, written in transliteration as 'v' (for example, "Hv?" sounds like "Huh?" nasalized, and means the same thing).

Family division

The Iroquoian family is composed of 11 languages.

I. Northern Iroquoian: A. Tuscarora-Nottoway:: 1. Tuscarora:: 2. Nottoway: B. Proto-Lake Iroquoian:: 3. Huron-Wyandot:: 4. Laurentian (languages or dialects) (?):: i. Iroquois Proper (also known as Five Nations Iroquois)::: 5. Onondaga::: 6. Susquehannock (also known as Andaste, Conestoga, Andastoerrhonon, Minqua)::: a. Seneca-Cayuga:::: 7. Seneca:::: 8. Cayuga::: b. Mohawk-Oneida:::: 9. Mohawk:::: 10. Oneida

II. Southern Iroquoian: 11. Cherokee

What has been called the Laurentian language appears to be actually more than one dialect or language. Many different groups making up the Wyandot and the Neutral have very little linguistic documentation. Among these are the Tionontati (also known as Khionontateronon, Petun, Tobacco Nation), the Wenro, and the Eriez (also known as Erie, Nation du Chat). These groups were called Atiwandaronk meaning "they who understand the language" by the Huron, and thus are grouped as a dialect related to Huron. The Meherrin peoples may have spoken an Iroquoian language, but there is not enough data to determine this with certainty.

Nottoway, Huron-Wyandot, Susquehannock, and the Laurentian languages/dialects are now all extinct. The last speakers of Susquehannock were all murdered by the Paxton Boys lynch mob in 1763.

Genetic relations

Some linguists group the Iroquoian languages with the Siouan languages as the Macro-Siouan family, but this larger family is not recognized by a consensus of linguists. For information regarding Proto-Iroquoian see Floyd Lounsbury's article on pages 334-343 in Volume 15 of the Handbook of North American Indians and Marianne Mithun's article on pages 259-282 of the Extending the Rafters: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Iroquois collection edited by Jack Campisi, Michael Foster, and Mithun. An article that is a bit more technical but also good is Blair Rudes' treatment of Proto-Iroquoian vowels in the Spring 1996 edition of Anthropological Linguistics.

Culture

The Iroquois were made up of a group or league of tribes that settled much of the land which presently spans from western New York to western Ohio. They were not nomadic but preferred to live in villages of many multi-roomed longhouses, built with saplings and bark or thatch. These longhouses could be up to 300 feet long. Villages were occupied for about 25-50 years. The Iroquois relied greatly on domestication of plant foods, but also supplemented their diet with hunting and gathering. Food such as corn, squash, beans, and other crops were cultivated, often on large fields where forest had been cut and burned for planting. It can be stated that they practiced a system of shifting horticulture. They spent much time on cultivation, harvesting, the preparatration of maize, and storing food. They stored their crops in various types of pottery jars. Pots were specialized by being much sturdier, constructed to withstand thermal stress, but were sensitive to mechanical stress. Iroquian pottery could also be used for a variety of reasons or uses. They were great for preparing maize. Excavated grains, pottery and other evidence suggests that a typical Indian meal consisted of soup made from different plants and animals, with corn as a staple in their diets.

Bibliography

* Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). Languages. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-1604-8774-9.
* Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
* Chilton, Elizabeth. "Farming and Social Complexity in the Northeast." North American Archaeology. Ed. Timothy R. Pauketat and Diana Dipaolo Loren. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005. 138-160.