Susquehannock, also known as Conestoga, is an extinct
Iroquoian language spoken by the
Native American people variously known as the
Susquehannock
The Susquehannock, also known as the Conestoga, Minquas, and Andaste, were an Iroquoian Peoples, Iroquoian people who lived in the lower Susquehanna River watershed in what is now Pennsylvania. Their name means “people of the muddy river.”
T ...
or Conestoga.
Lexicon
Information about Susquehannock is scant. Almost all known words and phrases come from the ''Vocabula Mahakuassica'', a vocabulary written by the Swedish missionary
Johannes Campanius in
New Sweden
New Sweden () was a colony of the Swedish Empire between 1638 and 1655 along the lower reaches of the Delaware River in what is now Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Established during the Thirty Years' War when Sweden was a g ...
during the 1640s and published by his grandson Thomas Campanius Holm in two separate works in 1696 and 1702.
Peter Stephen Du Ponceau translated the 1702 work from Swedish to English in 1834.
Campanius's vocabulary contains just over 100 words and phrases.
Linguist
Marianne Mithun believes this limited data is sufficient to classify Susquehannock as a Northern Iroquoian language, closely related to the languages of the
Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
[Marianne Mithun. 1981. "Stalking the Susquehannocks," ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 47:1-26.] Examples of Susquehannock-language place names include
Conestoga,
Juniata, and
Swatara.
Toponyms
Place names in the Conestoga homeland are documented as of Conestoga origin. After 1763, some Conestoga remnant peoples joined nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Conestoga language survived for a time. ''Indian Villages and Place Names in Pennsylvania with Numerous Historical Notes and References'' (1928), a book by Dr. George P. Donehoo identifies place names derived from the Conestoga language.
Notes
References
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External links
Native-languages.org* ''Conestoga Language Living Dictionary'', hosted on the Living Dictionaries platform
Northern Iroquoian languages
Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands
Extinct languages of North America
First Nations languages in Canada
Native American history of Maryland
Native American history of Pennsylvania
Languages extinct in the 18th century
Indigenous languages of Pennsylvania
Indigenous languages of Maryland
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