The Nansemond language is an extinct language that was spoken by the
Nansemond
The Nansemond are the Indigenous people of the Nansemond River, a 20-mile-long tributary of the James River in Virginia. Nansemond people lived in settlements on both sides of the Nansemond River where they fished (with the name "Nansemond" meani ...
people of
Virginia
Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...
, United States.
The Nansemond language may have been a member of the
Algonquian language family, similar to that of many other Atlantic coastal tribes. However, only six words have been preserved, which are not enough to identify and classify it.
Word list
The six Nansemond words, which may have been corrupted in memory by the time they were written down in 1901, are:
[''A Vocabulary of Powhatan, compiled by Captain John Smith, with two word-lists of Pamunkey and Nansemond from other sources.'' Evolution Publishing, 1997.]
:
Lexical comparison
Below is a comparison of Nansemond words and selected
proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unatte ...
s from Zamponi (2024).
:
See also
*
Pamunkey language
The Pamunkey language is an extinct language that was spoken by the Pamunkey people of Virginia, United States.
The Pamunkey language is generally assumed to have been Algonquian. However, only fourteen words have been preserved, which is not en ...
References
{{North American languages
Unclassified languages of North America
Extinct languages of North America
Indigenous languages of the North American eastern woodlands