Wampanoag People - Language and Revival

Language and Revival

The Wampanoag originally spoke a dialect of the Massachusett-Wampanoag language, which belongs to the Algonquian language family. The first Bible published in the colonies was a translation into Wampanoag by the missionary John Eliot in 1663. He created an orthography, which he taught the Wampanoag. Many became literate, using Wampanoag for letters, deeds and other historic documents that form the largest corpus in a written Native American language.

The rapid decline of speakers of the Wampanoag language began after the American Revolution. The historians Neal Salisbury and Colin G. Calloway note that at this time, New England Native American communities suffered from huge gender imbalances due to premature male deaths, especially due to warfare and maritime activity. Many Wampanoag women were forced to marry outside their linguistic groups, making it extremely difficult for them to maintain the various Wampanoag dialects.

Currently English speaking, since 1993 the Wampanoag have been working on a language revival led by the Wôpanâak (Wampanoag) Language Reclamation Project, a collaboration of several tribes and bands led by co-founder and director Jessie Little Doe Baird. A few children have become the first native speakers of Wôpanâak in more than 100 years. The project is training adult teachers to reach more children and to develop a curriculum for a Wôpanâak-based school. Baird has compiled a 10,000-word dictionary from university collections of colonial documents in Wôpanâak, as well as writing a grammar, collections of stories, and other books.