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| Tutelo | |
|---|---|
| Tutelo-Saponi | |
| Native to | United States |
| Region | Virginia, West Virginia; later Pennsylvania, New York, Ontario |
| Ethnicity | Tutelo, Saponi, Occaneechi, Manahoac, Monacan |
| Extinct | after 1982, with the death of Albert Green[1] |
Siouan
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | tta |
tta | |
| Glottolog | tute1247 |
 Tutelo language region prior to European colonization. | |
Tutelo, also known as Tutelo–Saponi, is a member of the Virginian branch of Siouan languages 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 at what is now known as Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation.
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, who had visited him at the Six Nations Reserve.[2][3]
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, Frank Speck, and Marianne Mithun 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.[4]
- ^ Marianne Mithun, The Languages of Native North America
- ^ Horatio Hale, "Tutelo Tribe and Language", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 21, no. 114 (1883)
- ^ Hale, Horatio (2001). The Tutelo Language. American Language Reprints. Vol. 23. Merchantville: Evolution Publishing. ISBN 1889758213.
- ^ Giulia Oliverio, "A grammar and dictionary of Tutelo", 1996 (PhD. thesis) pp. 6–19.