Susquehannock, also known as Conestoga, is an
Iroquoian language
The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking.
As of 2020, all surviving Iroquoian ...
spoken by the
Native American people variously known as the
Susquehannock or Conestoga.
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 ( sv, Nya Sverige) was a Swedish colony along the lower reaches of the Delaware River in what is now the United States from 1638 to 1655, established during the Thirty Years' War when Sweden was a great military power. New Sweden form ...
during the 1640s and published by his grandson Thomas Campanius Holm in two separate works in 1696 and 1702.
Peter Stephen Du Ponceau
Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (born Pierre-Étienne du Ponceau, June 3, 1760 – April 1, 1844) was a French-American linguist, philosopher, and jurist. After emigrating to the colonies in 1777, he served in the American Revolutionary War. Afterward ...
translated the 1702 work from Swedish to English in 1834.
Campanius's vocabulary contains just over 100 words and phrases.
Linguist
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 ...
believes this limited data is sufficient to classify Susquehannock as a Northern Iroquoian language, closely related to the languages of the
Haudenosaunee Confederacy
The Iroquois ( or ), officially the Haudenosaunee ( meaning "people of the longhouse"), are an Iroquoian-speaking confederacy of First Nations peoples in northeast North America/ Turtle Island. They were known during the colonial years to ...
.
[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.
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
* Holm, Thomas Campanius, et al. ''A Vocabulary of Susquehannock.'' 2nd ed., translated by Peter Stephen Duponceau, Evolution Publishing, 2007. American Language Reprints, edited by Claudio R. Salvucci. .
* 2021. ''Conestoga Language Living Dictionary.'' https://livingdictionaries.app/conestoga_language
* Mithun, Marianne. “Stalking the Susquehannocks.” ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', vol. 47, no. 1, Jan. 1981, pp. 1-26. ''JSTOR'',
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1264630.
* Donehoo, George P. ''Indian Villages and Place Names in Pennsylvania: with Numerous Historical Notes and References''. Sunbury Press, 2014. .
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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