The Pamunkey language is an extinct language that was spoken by the
Pamunkey
The Pamunkey Indian Tribe is a federally recognized tribe of Pamunkey people in Virginia. They control the Pamunkey Indian Reservation in King William County, Virginia. Historically, they spoke the Pamunkey language.
They are one of 11 Native ...
people of
Virginia
Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...
, United States.
The Pamunkey language is generally assumed to have been
Algonquian. However, only fourteen words have been preserved, which is not enough to determine that the language actually was Algonquian.
Word list
The only attested Pamunkey words, which were recorded in 1844 by Reverend E.A. Dalrymple
S.T.D., are:
:
Lexical comparison
Below is a comparison of Pamunkey words and selected
proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unatte ...
s from Zamponi (2024).
:
Except for ''nikkut'' 'one', which is clearly similar to
Powhatan
Powhatan people () are Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands who belong to member tribes of the Powhatan Confederacy, or Tsenacommacah. They are Algonquian peoples whose historic territories were in eastern Virginia.
Their Powh ...
''nekut'', none of the words correspond to any known Algonquian language, or to reconstructions of
proto-Algonquian
Proto-Algonquian (commonly abbreviated PA) is the proto-language from which the various Algonquian languages are descended. It is generally estimated to have been spoken around 2,500 to 3,000 years ago, but there is less agreement on where it was ...
. Given the extensive ethnic mixing that occurred among the Pamunkey before 1844, it is possible that Dalrymple's list is from an inter-ethnic pidgin or even a language from an otherwise unknown language family, rather than from the original Pamunkey language.
[Benita Howell, Richard Levy & Alvin Luckenbach, 'What Is Dalrymple's Pamunkey?', ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', vol. 45, no. 1 (Jan. 1979), pp. 78–80]
See also
*
Nansemond language
References
{{North American languages
Unclassified languages of North America
Extinct languages of North America
Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands