Language
The earliest Europeans in the Carolinas were astounded by the linguistic diversity of what is now the Southeastern United States. Within the region now known as North Carolina, three language families were represented, as distinct from one another as Indo-European languages are from Uralic languages:
- The Hatteras, Chowan, Moratok, Pamlico, Secotan, Machapunga, and the Weapemeoc of the coastal plain spoke a variety of Algonquian languages.
- The Cherokee, Tuscarora, Coree, and Meherrin, who inhabited homelands from the coastal plain to the Appalachian Mountains, spoke a variety of Iroquoian languages.
- The Catawba, Cheraw, Cape Fear, Eno, Keyauwee, Occaneechi, Tutelo, Saponi, Shakori, Sissipahaw, Sugeree, Wateree, Waxhaw, and Waccamaw of the Cape Fear River and Piedmont regions, were related Siouan-speaking peoples.
The ancestral Siouan Woccon language of the Waccamaw Siouan Indians of North Carolina was lost due to devastating population losses and social disruption of the 18th and 19th centuries, and survives in only a handful of vocabulary items that were recorded in the early 1700s.
Read more about this topic: Waccamaw Siouan
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“We find that the child who does not yet have language at his command, the child under two and a half, will be able to cooperate with our education if we go easy on the “blocking” techniques, the outright prohibitions, the “no’s” and go heavy on “substitution” techniques, that is, the redirection or certain impulses and the offering of substitute satisfactions.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Consensus is usually made possible by vague language and shallow commitments.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)