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Beothuk ( or ), also called Beothukan, is an extinct language once spoken by the indigenous
Beothuk The Beothuk ( or ; also spelled Beothuck) were a group of indigenous people who lived on the island of Newfoundland. Beginning around AD 1500, the Beothuk culture formed. This appeared to be the most recent cultural manifestation of peoples ...
people of
Newfoundland Newfoundland and Labrador (; french: Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador; frequently abbreviated as NL) is the easternmost province of Canada, in the country's Atlantic region. The province comprises the island of Newfoundland and the continental region ...
. The Beothuk have been extinct since 1829, and there are few written accounts of their language. Hence, little is known about it, with practically no structural data existing for Beothuk.


Classification

Claims of links with the neighbouring Algonquian language family date back at least to
Robert Gordon Latham Robert Gordon Latham FRS (24 March 1812 – 9 March 1888) was an English ethnologist and philologist. Early life The eldest son of Thomas Latham, vicar of Billingborough, Lincolnshire, he was born there on 24 March 1812. He entered Eton Colle ...
in 1862. From 1968 onwards, John Hewson has put forth evidence of sound correspondences and shared morphology with Proto-Algonquian and other better-documented Algonquian languages. If this is valid, Beothuk would be an extremely divergent member of the family. Other researchers claimed that proposed similarities are more likely the result of borrowing than cognates. The limited and poor nature of the documentation means there is not enough evidence to draw strong conclusions. Owing to this overall lack of meaningful evidence,
Ives Goddard Robert Hale Ives Goddard III (born 1941) is a linguist and a curator emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. He is widely considered the leading expert on the Algonqui ...
and
Lyle Campbell Lyle Richard Campbell (born October 22, 1942) is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeri ...
claim that any connections between Beothuk and Algonquian are unknown and likely unknowable.


Recorded song

In 1910, American
anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and v ...
Frank Speck Frank Gouldsmith Speck (November 8, 1881 – February 6, 1950) was an American anthropologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples among the Eastern Woodland Native Americans o ...
recorded a 74-year-old native woman named Santu Toney singing a song purported to be in the language. The recording resurfaced at the very end of the 20th century. Some sources give the year 1929, but the 1910 date is confirmed in Speck's book ''Beothuk and Micmac'' (New York 1922, p. 67). The words are hard to hear and not understood. Santu said she had been taught the song by her father, which may be evidence that one person with a Beothuk connection was alive after the death of Shanawdithit in 1829 since Santu Toney was born about 1835). Contemporary researchers have tried to make a transcription of the song and to clean up the recording with modern methods. Native groups have learned the song.
James P. Howley James Patrick Howley (born 7 July 1847 near St. John's, Newfoundland and died 1 January 1918 at St. John's) was a naturalist and geologist, one of the first Newfoundlanders of European descent to visit the interior of the island of Newfoundland at ...
, Director of the Geological Survey of Newfoundland, who for more than forty years was interested in the history of the Beothuk, doubted (in 1914) the truthfulness of Santu Toney.


Wordlists

Beothuk is known only from several wordlists from the 18th and the 19th centuries by George C. Pulling (1792), Rev. John Clinch, Rev. John Leigh, and Hercules Robinson (1834). They contain more than 400 words that had been collected from speakers such as Oubee, Demasduwit, and
Shanawdithit Shanawdithit (ca. 1801 – June 6, 1829), also noted as Shawnadithititis, Shawnawdithit, Nancy April and Nancy Shanawdithit, was the last known living member of the Beothuk people, who inhabited Newfoundland, Canada. Remembered for her contr ...
, but there were no examples of connected speech. Wordlists had also been collected by W. E. Cormack (who worked with
Shanawdithit Shanawdithit (ca. 1801 – June 6, 1829), also noted as Shawnadithititis, Shawnawdithit, Nancy April and Nancy Shanawdithit, was the last known living member of the Beothuk people, who inhabited Newfoundland, Canada. Remembered for her contr ...
), Richard King (whose wordlist had been passed on to
Robert Gordon Latham Robert Gordon Latham FRS (24 March 1812 – 9 March 1888) was an English ethnologist and philologist. Early life The eldest son of Thomas Latham, vicar of Billingborough, Lincolnshire, he was born there on 24 March 1812. He entered Eton Colle ...
), and
James P. Howley James Patrick Howley (born 7 July 1847 near St. John's, Newfoundland and died 1 January 1918 at St. John's) was a naturalist and geologist, one of the first Newfoundlanders of European descent to visit the interior of the island of Newfoundland at ...
(1915) (who worked with Jure, a widow from the islands of the Bay of Exploits). The lack of any systematic or consistent representation of the vocabulary in the wordlists makes it daunting to establish the sound system of Beothuk, and words that are listed separately on the lists may be the same word transcribed in different ways. Moreover, the lists are known to have many mistakes. That, along with the lack of connected speech leaves little upon which to build any reconstruction of Beothuk.


Combined lists

The wordlists have been transcribed and analyzed in Hewson (1978). The combined Beothuk wordlists below have been reproduced from Hewson (1978: 149-167).Hewson, John. 1978. ''Beothuk Vocabularies''. (Technical Papers of the Newfoundland Museum, 2.) St. John's: Newfoundland:
Newfoundland Museum The Rooms is a cultural facility in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The facility opened in 2005 and houses the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Provincial Muse ...
. 178pp.


Numerals

Numerals in Beothuk:


Months

Months in Beothuk:


References


External links


Text including Beothuk vocabularyAbout the Beothuk languageOLAC resources in and about the Beothuk language
{{North American languages Algonquian languages Language isolates of North America Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands First Nations languages in Canada Extinct languages of North America
Language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
Languages extinct in the 1820s 1820s disestablishments in North America