The Ohio Valley Siouan, or Southeastern Siouan, languages are a subfamily of the

Western Siouan languages The Western Siouan languages, also called Siouan proper or simply Siouan, are a large language family native to North America. They are closely related to the Catawban languages, sometimes called Eastern Siouan, and together with them constitute ...

, far to the east and south of the Mississippi River. The group has Ofo and

Biloxi Biloxi ( ; ) is a city in and one of two county seats of Harrison County, Mississippi, United States (the other being the adjacent city of Gulfport). The 2010 United States Census recorded the population as 44,054 and in 2019 the estimated popu ...

, in the Lower Mississippi River valley, and

Tutelo The Tutelo (also Totero, Totteroy, Tutera; Yesan in Tutelo) were Native Americans in the United States, Native American people living above the Atlantic Seaboard fall line, Fall Line in present-day Virginia and West Virginia. They spoke a Siouan d ...

, historically spoken in Virginia, near the territory of the

Catawban languages The Catawban, or Eastern Siouan, languages form a small language family in east North America. The Catawban family is a branch of the larger Siouan a.k.a. Siouan–Catawban family. Family division The Catawban family consists of two languages: ...

. All of the languages are now extinct. They are called "Ohio Valley Siouan" languages because of a speculative origin along the

Ohio River The Ohio River is a long river in the United States. It is located at the boundary of the Midwestern and Southern United States, flowing southwesterly from western Pennsylvania to its mouth on the Mississippi River at the southern tip of Illino ...

, but only the

and the

Saponi The Saponi or Sappony are a Native American tribe historically based in the Piedmont of North Carolina and Virginia.Raymond D. DeMaillie, "Tutelo and Neighboring Groups," pages 286–87. They spoke a Siouan language, related to the languages of ...

historically dwelled near there. They possibly migrated to the

Roanoke River The Roanoke River ( ) runs long through southern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina in the United States. A major river of the southeastern United States, it drains a largely rural area of the coastal plain from the eastern edge of the App ...

from the region of the Big Sandy River just prior to European contact. The Biloxi and the Ofo lived far to the south, along the Mississippi River.

Charles F. Voegelin Charles Frederick "Carl" Voegelin (January 14, 1906 – May 22, 1986), often cited as C. F. Voegelin, was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was one of the leading authorities on Indigenous languages of North America, specifically the Al ...

established, on the basis of linguistic evidence, that Catawban was very divergent from the other Siouan languages (only a minor fraction of the lexicon is obviously cognate, and it uses difficult-to-recognize personal pronouns and favors suppletion). However, Voegelin argued that "not only Biloxi and Ofo but also Tutelo form one group which I propose to call Ohio Valley Siouan. The implication that this group dispersed from the Ohio River Valley (the Tutelo moving east, the Biloxi and Ofo moving south) goes one step beyond Swanton's inference that the Ofo can be identified with the

Mosopelea The Mosopelea, or Ofo, were a Siouan-speaking Native American people who historically inhabited the upper Ohio River. In reaction to Iroquois Confederacy invasions to take control of hunting grounds in the late 17th century, they moved south to t ...

of the Ohio: it places the Biloxi and Tutelo in the Ohio Valley at the time when the Ofo were known as the Mosopelea, or just prior to that time."

References

Western Siouan languages {{indigenousAmerican-lang-stub