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 peoples in Canada, Indigenous people of Canada who lived on the island of Newfoundland (island), Newfoundland.
The Beothuk culture formed around 1500 CE. This may have been ...
people of
Newfoundland
Newfoundland and Labrador is the easternmost province of Canada, in the country's Atlantic region. The province comprises the island of Newfoundland and the continental region of Labrador, having a total size of . As of 2025 the population ...
. 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 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 scientist engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropologists study aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms, values ...
Frank Speck 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, 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.
Vocabulary
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,
Demasduit, and
Shanawdithit, but there were no examples of connected speech. Wordlists had also been collected by
W. E. Cormack (who worked with Shanawdithit), Richard King (whose wordlist had been passed on to
Robert Gordon Latham), and
James P. Howley (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. 178pp.]
Numerals
Numerals in Beothuk:
Months
Months in Beothuk:
Comparison with Proto-Algonquian
Below is a comparison of Beothuk words from Hewson (1978) with
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 ...
lexical reconstructions from Hewson (2017).
[Hewson, John. 2017. ]
Proto-Algonquian online dictionary
'. Algonquian Dictionaries Project.
:
Legacy
The prehistoric
cnidarian
Cnidaria ( ) is a phylum under kingdom Animalia containing over 11,000 species of aquatic invertebrates found both in fresh water, freshwater and marine environments (predominantly the latter), including jellyfish, hydroid (zoology), hydroids, ...
animal ''
Haootia'' takes its name from the Beothuk word for 'demon'.
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 that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
Languages extinct in the 1820s
1820s disestablishments in North America