Tuscarora language facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Tuscarora |
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| Ska꞉rù꞉ręʼ Skarò˙rə̨ˀ |
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| Native to | United States | |||
| Region | Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation in southern Ontario, Tuscarora Reservation in northwestern New York, and eastern North Carolina | |||
| Ethnicity | 17,000 Tuscarora people (1997) | |||
| Extinct | 2 December 2020 | |||
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Pre-contact distribution of Tuscarora
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Tuscarora, also known as Skarò˙rə̨ˀ, was a language spoken by the Tuscarora people. It belonged to the Iroquoian language family. People spoke Tuscarora in southern Ontario, Canada, and in parts of North Carolina and northwestern New York around Niagara Falls in the United States. Sadly, the last fluent speaker of Tuscarora passed away in late 2020, making the language extinct.
The original home of the Tuscarora people was in eastern North Carolina. This area included places like Goldsboro, Kinston, and Smithfield.
The name Tuscarora means "hemp people." This comes from the Indian hemp or milkweed plants, which were very important to their society. The name Skarureh means "long shirt people." This refers to a special long shirt worn by men as part of their traditional clothing.
In the mid-1970s, about 50 people still spoke Tuscarora. They lived on the Tuscarora Reservation in Lewiston, New York, and at the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation near Brantford, Ontario. Even though the language is now extinct, efforts were made to keep it alive. For example, the Tuscarora School in Lewiston taught the language to children from pre-kindergarten to sixth grade. This helped preserve it as a heritage language.
Tuscarora can seem complicated because many ideas can be expressed in just one word. Words are often made up of several smaller parts. The language was written using symbols from the Roman alphabet, with some special marks called diacritics.
Contents
Sounds of Tuscarora (Phonology)
Every language has its own set of sounds, like vowels and consonants. Tuscarora had a unique sound system.
Vowels
Tuscarora had four regular vowels and one nasal vowel. Nasal vowels are sounds where air comes out of your nose, like the "an" in "want." Vowels could be either short or long, which changed their meaning. Long vowels were marked with a colon (:) or a dot (·). Stressed vowels, which are spoken with more emphasis, had a special mark called an acute accent (´).
Consonants
The Tuscarora language used ten main consonant sounds. These included stops (like 't' and 'k'), fricatives (like 's' and 'h'), a nasal sound ('n'), a 'r' sound, and two glide sounds ('w' and 'y'). Sometimes, these sounds would change slightly when they were next to other sounds. For example, the 's' sound could sometimes become like the 'sh' in "shoe."
How Words Are Built (Morphology)
In Tuscarora, words are often built from many smaller pieces. This is especially true for verbs and nouns.
Verbs
A verb is a word that describes an action or a state of being. In Tuscarora, verbs are made up of several parts that always appear in a specific order:
- Prepronominal prefixes: These come first and can show things like when something happened (past, present, future), or where an action is going.
- Pronominal prefixes: These are very important. They tell you who is doing the action (the subject) and, if there's an object, who or what the action is being done to. For example, in the Tuscarora word rà:weh (meaning "He is talking"), the part rà tells you that a male person is the subject.
- Verb base: This is the main part of the verb, like the core meaning. It can be simple or have other parts added to it to change its meaning, like making it reflexive (doing something to oneself) or causative (making something happen).
- Aspect suffixes: These come at the end. They show how the action happens, like if it's a quick action, something ongoing, or something completed. They also show if the action happened in the past, present, or future.
Nouns
Nouns are words for people, places, or things. Like verbs, Tuscarora nouns are also built from different parts:
- Pronominal prefix: Similar to verbs, these prefixes tell you about the noun, like its gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter), how many there are (singular or plural), and if it's human or not.
- Noun stem: This is the main part of the noun. Sometimes, noun stems can be made from verbs by adding a special ending.
- Nominal suffix: Most nouns end with a specific sound, like -eh.
Possessive Words
Tuscarora had different ways to show ownership. For example, owning a body part (like your arm) was shown differently from owning an object (like a piece of paper).
Descriptive Endings
Nouns could also have special endings called "attributive suffixes." These endings could describe the noun, like making it sound smaller (a diminutive) or bigger (an augmentive). For example, adding a diminutive suffix to "cat" would make it mean "small cat."
Sentence Structure (Syntax)
Syntax is about how words are put together to form sentences.
Word Order
The basic word order in Tuscarora was Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), just like in English ("William saw a dog"). However, the order could sometimes change depending on who was doing the action and who was receiving it. For example, if the subject was clearly identified by a special prefix on the verb, the order could be Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) or Object-Subject-Verb (OSV), and the sentence would still mean the same thing.
For example, all these sentences mean "William saw a dog":
- William he-saw-it dog. (SVO)
- he-saw-it William dog. (VSO)
- dog William he-saw-it. (OSV)
Noun Incorporation
One interesting feature of Tuscarora is "noun incorporation." This means that nouns can be built right into the verb itself. This is common in polysynthetic languages, where one long verb can sometimes be an entire sentence, including the subject and the object. For example, a single verb could mean "I bought her some bread."
Words You Might Know (Vocabulary Examples)
Here are a few words from the Tuscarora language:
- tswé:ʔn - 'hello'
- stá:kwi:ʔ - 'high'
- kè:rih - 'I think'
- ótkwareh - 'blood'
- otá:ʔnareh - 'bread'
Related Languages (Relations)
Tuscarora is part of the Northern Iroquoian language family. Other languages in this family include Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Cayuga. The Nottoway language, spoken by a neighboring tribe, was also closely related to Tuscarora.
Some experts believe that Tuscarora and Cayuga once shared a common ancestor language. However, Tuscarora then developed on its own, without further contact with Cayuga or the other Iroquoian languages. Other researchers have grouped Tuscarora with other "peripheral" Iroquoian languages, meaning they were a bit more distinct from the core group of five Iroquois languages.
Images for kids
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Pre-contact distribution of Tuscarora
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Tuscarora is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
