Wyandot language
Wyandot language
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Wyandot language

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Wyandot language

Wyandot (also Wyandotte, Wendat, Quendat or Huron) is the Iroquoian language traditionally spoken by the people known as Wyandot or Wyandotte, descended from the Tionontati. It is considered a sister to the Wendat language, spoken by descendants of the Huron-Wendat Confederacy. It was last spoken, before its revival, by members located primarily in Oklahoma, United States, and Quebec, Canada. Linguists have traditionally considered Wyandot as a dialect or modern form of Wendat, even though the two are no longer mutually intelligible.

Wyandot essentially died out as a spoken language with the death of the last native speaker in 1972, though there are now attempts at revitalization:

Although linguists have equated it with or seen it as a dialect of the Iroquoian Wendat (Huron), Wyandot can be regarded as distinct enough to be considered its own language. Wyandot's divergence from Wendat appears to have occurred sometime between the mid-18th century, when the Jesuit missionary Pierre Potier (1708–1781) documented the Petun dialect of Wendat in Canada, and the mid-nineteenth century. By the time the ethnographer Marius Barbeau made his transcriptions of the Wyandot language in Wyandotte, Oklahoma, in 1911–1912, it had diverged enough to be considered a separate language.

Significant differences between Wendat and Wyandot in diachronic phonology, pronominal prefixes, and lexicon challenge the traditional view that Wyandot is modern Wendat. History suggests the roots of this language are complex; the ancestors of the Wyandot were refugees from various Huronian tribes who banded together to form one tribe. After being displaced from their ancestral home in Canada on Georgian Bay, the group traveled south, first to Ohio and later to Kansas and Oklahoma. As many members of this group were Petun, some scholars have suggested that Wyandot is more influenced by Petun than by its descent from Wendat.

The work of Barbeau was used by linguist Craig Kopris to reconstruct Wyandot; he developed a grammar and dictionary of the language. This work represents the most comprehensive research done on the Wyandot language as spoken in Oklahoma just prior to its extinction (or its dormancy as modern tribal members refer to it).

The phonemic inventory of the consonants is written by using the orthography used by Kopris in his analysis, which was based on Barbeau's transcriptions. The orthographic symbol is written in angled brackets where it differs from the IPA. Kopris listed places of articulation for the consonants but noted that the distinction had not been made by Barbeau.

[m] is placed in parentheses because it appears as an allophone of /w/ in nearly all cases, but that cannot always explain its presence. The presence of a single voiced stop, /d/, contrasting with the voiceless stop /t/, makes Wyandot unusual among Iroquoian languages, as it is the only one with a phonemic voicing distinction. The /r/ sound is pronounced as [ɹ] rather than [r], according to researchers who phonetically transcribed directly from fluent speakers and described it as "corresponding to the English r" and as "the smooth English sound, never vibrant." The Wyandot /d/ and /n/ are both cognate with /n/ in other Northern Iroquoian languages. Although the two largely appear to be in free variation, they clearly contrast in some cases (as in the minimal pairs da 'that, the, who' and na 'now, then'). The ambiguity of the relationship between /d/ and /n/ seems to indicate that the two are in the process of a phonemic split that was not yet complete by the early 20th century.

Another unique feature of Wyandot is the presence of the voiced fricative /ʒ/, creating an /ʃ/-/ʒ/ contrast, but there is no corresponding /s/-/z/ contrast. The phoneme /k/ also has no voiced counterpart.

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