Tutelo, also known as

Tutelo The Tutelo (also Totero, Totteroy, Tutera; Yesan in Tutelo) were Native American people living above the Fall Line in present-day Virginia and West Virginia. They spoke a Siouan dialect of the Tutelo language thought to be similar to that of thei ...

–

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 ...

, is a member of the Virginian branch of

Siouan languages Siouan or Siouan–Catawban is a language family of North America that is located primarily in the Great Plains, Ohio and Mississippi valleys and southeastern North America with a few other languages in the east. Name Authors who call the entire ...

that were originally spoken in the territory now known as Virginia and West Virginia in the United States. Some speakers of Tutelo migrated north to escape warfare. Traveling through North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, they finally settled in Ontario after the

American Revolutionary War The American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783), also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was a major war of the American Revolution. Widely considered as the war that secured the independence of t ...

with the Cayuga (Iroqouian speakers) at what is now known as

Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation Six Nations (or Six Nations of the Grand River, french: Réserve des Six Nations, see, Ye:i’ Níónöëdzage:h) is demographically the largest First Nations reserve in Canada. As of the end of 2017, it has a total of 27,276 members, 12,848 of ...

Nikonha Nikonha, also known as Waskiteng and Mosquito, (b. ca. 1765- d. 1871, Tutelo) was known as the last full-blooded speaker of Tutelo, a Virginia Siouan language. He is reported to have been around 106 years old when he died at Six Nations of the Grand ...

, the last fluent speaker in Tutelo country, died in 1871 at age 106. The year before, he had managed to impart about 100 words of vocabulary to the ethnologist

Horatio Hale Horatio Emmons Hale (May 3, 1817 – December 28, 1896) was an American-Canadian ethnologist, philologist and businessman. He is known for his study of languages as a key for classifying ancient peoples and being able to trace their migrations. ...

, who had visited him at the Six Nations Reserve.Horatio Hale
"Tutelo Tribe and Language"
''Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society'' 21, no. 114 (1883) In 1753 the Tutelo had joined the Iroquois confederacy under the sponsorship of the

Cayuga Cayuga often refers to: * Cayuga people, a native tribe to North America, part of the Iroquois Confederacy * Cayuga language, the language of the Cayuga Cayuga may also refer to: Places Canada * Cayuga, Ontario United States * Cayuga, Illinoi ...

. Descendants living at Grand River spoke Tutelo well into the twentieth century, when it was recorded by Hale and other scholars including J. N. B. Hewitt,

James Owen Dorsey James Owen Dorsey (October 31, 1848 – February 4, 1895) was an American ethnologist, linguist, and Episcopalian missionary in the Dakota Territory, who contributed to the description of the Ponca, Omaha, and other southern Siouan languages. He ...

, Leo J. Frachtenberg,

Edward Sapir Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American Jewish anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States. Sap ...

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 of ...

, and

Marianne Mithun Marianne Mithun (born 1946) is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 19 ...

. The last active speakers, a mother and daughter, died in a house fire shortly before Mithun's visit in 1982. The last native speaker, Albert Green, died some time after that.Giulia Oliverio, "Tutelo Grammar and Dictionary", 1996 (PhD. thesis) pp. 6–19.

Documentation

Hale published a brief grammar and vocabulary in 1883 and confirmed the language as Siouan through comparisons with

Dakota Dakota may refer to: * Dakota people, a sub-tribe of the Sioux ** Dakota language, their language Dakota may also refer to: Places United States * Dakota, Georgia, an unincorporated community * Dakota, Illinois, a town * Dakota, Minnesota, ...

and

Hidatsa The Hidatsa are a Siouan people. They are enrolled in the federally recognized Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. Their language is related to that of the Crow, and they are sometimes considered a paren ...

. His excitement was considerable to find an ancient Dakotan language, which was once widespread among inland tribes in Virginia, to have been preserved on a predominantly Iroquoian-speaking reserve in Ontario. Previously, the only recorded information on the language had been a short list of words and phrases collected by Lieutenant John Fontaine at Fort Christanna in 1716, and a few assorted terms recorded by colonial sources, such as John Lederer,

Abraham Wood Abraham Wood (1610–1682), sometimes referred to as "General" or "Colonel" Wood, was an English fur trader, militia officer, politician and explorer of 17th century colonial Virginia. Wood helped build and maintained Fort Henry at the falls of ...

, Hugh Jones, and

William Byrd II William Byrd II (March 28, 1674August 26, 1744) was an American Planter class, planter, lawyer, surveyor, author, and a man of letters. Born in Colonial Virginia, he was educated in London, where he practiced law. Upon his father's death, he ret ...

. Hale noted the testimony of colonial historian Robert Beverley, Jr.--that the dialect of the

Occaneechi The Occaneechi (also Occoneechee and Akenatzy) are Native Americans who lived in the 17th century primarily on the large, long Occoneechee Island and east of the confluence of the Dan and Roanoke rivers, near current-day Clarksville, Virginia. ...

, believed to be related to Tutelo, was used as a ''

lingua franca A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...

'' by all the tribes in the region regardless of their first languages, and it was known to the chiefs, "conjurers," and priests of all tribes. These shamans used it in their ceremonies, just as Roman Catholic priests in Europe and the US used

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

. Hale's grammar also noted further comparisons to Latin and

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic pe ...

. He remarked on the classical nature of Tutelo's rich variety of verb tenses available to the speaker, including what he remarked as an '

aorist Aorist (; abbreviated ) verb forms usually express perfective aspect and refer to past events, similar to a preterite. Ancient Greek grammar had the aorist form, and the grammars of other Indo-European languages and languages influenced by th ...

' perfect verb tense, ending in "-wa". James Dorsey, another Siouan linguist, collected extensive vocabulary and grammar samples around the same time as Hale, as did Hewitt a few years later. Frachtenberg and Sapir both visited the Six Nations Ontario reserve in the first decade of the 1900s and found that only a few Cayuga of Tutelo ancestry remembered a handful of Tutelo words. Speck did much fieldwork to record and preserve their cultural traditions in the 1930s, but found little of the speech remaining. Mithun managed to collect a handful of terms that were still remembered in 1980. The language as preserved by these efforts is now believed to have been mutually intelligible with, if not identical to, the speech of other Virginia Siouan groups in general, including the Monacan and Manahoac and Nahyssan confederacies, as well as the subdivisions of Occaneechi, Saponi, etc. In the 21st century, descendants of the original native groups and others are interested in contemporary

language revitalization Language revitalization, also referred to as language revival or reversing language shift, is an attempt to halt or reverse the decline of a language or to revive an extinct one. Those involved can include linguists, cultural or community groups, o ...

. In 2021 the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages assisted Tutelo activists in building a Living Dictionary for Tutelo-Saponi Monacan.

Phonology

Oliverio proposes the following analysis of the sound system of Tutelo:Oliverio, Giulia R.M. (1996). ''A Grammar and Dictionary of Tutelo''. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas dissertation.

Consonants

Vowels

Tutelo has a standard vowel inventory for a Siouan language. Proto-Siouan *ũ and *ũː is lowered to /õ/ and /õː/, respectively.

Oral vowels

Nasal vowels

Grammar

Independent personal pronouns, as recorded by Dorsey, are: * 1st sing. - ''Mima'' (I) * 2nd sing. - ''Yima'' (you) * 3rd sing. - ''Ima'' (he, she, it) The pronoun ''Huk'' "all" may be added to form the plurals ''Mimahuk'' "we" and ''Yimahuk'' "ye", and "they" is ''Imahese''. In verbal conjugations, the subject pronouns are represented by various prefixes, infixes, and or suffixes, usually as follows: * 1st sing. - ''Ma-'' or ''Wa-'' (or ''-ma-'', ''-wa-'') * 2nd sing. - ''Ya-'' (''-ya-'') * 3rd sing. - (null; no affixes, simple verb) * 1st plur. - ''Mank-'' or ''Wa'en-'' (prefix only) * 2nd plur. - ''Ya-'' (''-ya-'') + -''pui'' * 3rd plur. - -''-hle'', ''-hne''. An example as given by Hale is the verb ''Yandosteka'' "love", and the

infix An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem (an existing word or the core of a family of words). It contrasts with '' adfix,'' a rare term for an affix attached to the outside of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix. When marking text for i ...

is between ''yando-'' and ''-steka'': *''Yandowasteka'', I love *''Yandoyasteka'', you love *''Yandosteka'', he or she loves *''Mankyandosteka'', we love *''Yandoyastekapui'', ye love *''Yandostekahnese'', they love. The last form includes the common additional tense suffix ''-se'', which literally conveys the progressive tense. There are also 'stative' classes of verbs that take the 'passive' (oblique) pronoun affixes (mi- or wi-, yi- etc.) as subjects. Additional tenses can be formed by the use of other suffixes including ''-ka'' (past), ''-ta'' (future), ''-wa'' (aorist or perfect), ''-kewa'' (past perfect), and ''-ma'' (perfect progressive). Rules for combining the suffixes with stems in final vowels are slightly complex.

References

External links

Tutelo Language and the Saponi/Tutelo Indian Tribe (Saponey, Haliwa-Saponi)
* Swadesh list for Tutelo-Saponi on Wiktionary
OLAC resources in and about the Tutelo language
{{Siouan languages Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands Native American language revitalization Western Siouan languages Languages extinct in the 1980s Extinct languages of North America Indigenous languages of Maryland