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 dialect of the Siouan Tutelo language thought to be similar to that of th ...

– Saponi (), is a member of the Virginian branch of

Siouan languages Siouan ( ), also known as Siouan–Catawban ( ), is a language family of North America 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 ...

that were originally spoken in what is now Virginia and West Virginia in the United States. Most Tutelo speakers migrated north to escape warfare. They traveled through North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New York. In 1753, the Tutelo had joined the Iroquois Confederacy under the sponsorship of the Cayuga. 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 the armed conflict that comprised the final eight years of the broader American Revolution, in which Am ...

at what is now known as

Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation Six Nations (or Six Nations of the Grand River) 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 whom live on the reserve. The six nations of the Iroquois Confederac ...

. Nikonha, 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, 1817December 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. Hale ...

, 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) Descendants living at Grand River Reserve in Ontario spoke Tutelo well into the 20th century. Linguists including Horatio Hale, J. N. B. Hewitt, James Owen Dorsey, Leo J. Frachtenberg,

Edward Sapir Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguistics, 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 ...

, Frank Speck, and

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

recorded the language. 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 sometime after that.Giulia Oliverio,
A grammar and dictionary of Tutelo
, 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 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 pa ...

. 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 John Lederer was a 17th-century German physician and an explorer of the Appalachian Mountains. He and the members of his party became the first Europeans to crest the Blue Ridge Mountains (1669) and the first to see the Shenandoah Valley and the ...

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 o ...

, Hugh Jones, and William Byrd II. Hale noted the testimony of colonial historian Robert Beverley, Jr. that the dialect of the Occaneechi, 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, link language or language of wider communication (LWC), is a Natural language, language systematically used to make co ...

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 spiritual practitioners 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 spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

. 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 classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...

. 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 the ...

" 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 The Manahoac, also recorded as Mahock, were a Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands, who lived in northern Virginia at the time of European contact. They spoke a Siouan language and numbered approximately 1,000. They lived primarily a ...

and Nahyssan confederacies, as well as the subdivisions of Occaneechi, Saponi, etc. In 1996, Giulia Oliverio wrote ''A Grammar and Dictionary of Tutelo'' as her dissertation. 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 and 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 pronoun 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 languageTutelo-Saponi Monacan Living Dictionary
{{Siouan languages Extinct languages of North America Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands Languages extinct in the 1980s

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 ...

Western Siouan languages Occaneechi Saponi