Woccon was one of two

Catawban The Catawban, or Eastern Siouan, languages form a small language family in east North America. The Catawban family is a branch of the larger Siouan a.k.a. Siouan–Catawban family. Family division The Catawban family consists of two languages: ...

(also known as Eastern Siouan) languages of what is now the

Eastern United States The Eastern United States, commonly referred to as the American East, Eastern America, or simply the East, is the region of the United States to the east of the Mississippi River. In some cases the term may refer to a smaller area or the East C ...

. Together with the

Western Siouan languages The Western Siouan languages, also called Siouan proper or simply Siouan, are a large language family native to North America. They are closely related to the Catawban languages, sometimes called Eastern Siouan, and together with them constitute ...

, they formed the Siouan language family. It is attested only in a vocabulary of 143 words, printed in a 1709 compilation by English colonist John Lawson of Carolina. The Woccon people that Lawson encountered have been considered by scholars to have been a late subdivision of the

Waccamaw The Waccamaw people were an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, who lived in villages along the Waccamaw and Pee Dee rivers in North and South Carolina in the 18th century.Lerch 328 Language Very little remains of the Waccam ...

. The Woccon are believed to have been decimated as a people during the

Tuscarora War The Tuscarora War was fought in North Carolina from September 10, 1711 until February 11, 1715 between the Tuscarora people and their allies on one side and European American settlers, the Yamassee, and other allies on the other. This was con ...

in the Carolinas with English colonists in 1713. Survivors were likely absorbed into the

Tuscarora Tuscarora may refer to the following: First nations and Native American people and culture * Tuscarora people **'' Federal Power Commission v. Tuscarora Indian Nation'' (1960) * Tuscarora language, an Iroquoian language of the Tuscarora people * ...

, an Iroquoian-speaking people. Most of the Tuscarora migrated north to New York, settling with the five nations of the

Iroquois 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 ...

by 1722 and being accepted as the sixth. Under these pressures, the Woccon language is believed to have become extinct in the eighteenth century. Some descendants of partial Woccon ancestry survive in the Southeast as well as Canada, where the Six Nations of the Iroquois migrated after the American Revolutionary War. In 2021 the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages assisted the Cape Fear Band of Skarure and Woccon Indians in North Carolina to build a 'Living Dictionary' for Woccon as part of an effort to revive the language. This group is not

state-recognized State-recognized tribes in the United States are organizations that identify as Native American tribes or heritage groups that do not meet the criteria for federally recognized Indian tribes but have been recognized by a process established unde ...

federally recognized This is a list of federally recognized tribes in the contiguous United States of America. There are also federally recognized Alaska Native tribes. , 574 Indian tribes were legally recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) of the United ...

as being descended from the Cape Fear,

, or the

References

Further reading