Wampanoag

Where it’s spoken

Wampanoag (Wôpanâak) was the language of the Wampanoag confederacy that met the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620. It had largely fallen out of daily use by the late 1800s under English-language schooling and missionisation. The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, founded in 1993 by Jessie Little Doe Baird, has produced a new generation of fluent speakers using historical sources — including a 17th-century Bible translation that preserved an enormous lexicon and grammar.

What it sounds like

A polysynthetic Algonquian language with elaborate verb inflection encoding animacy, person, number, and obviation (a fourth-person reference for tracking multiple third-person referents).

How it’s written

Originally unwritten. John Eliot, a Puritan missionary, devised a Latin-based orthography in the 1660s to publish a Wampanoag Bible — making it the first Bible printed in the Americas. The revitalisation movement uses a modernised version of that system.