Iroquoian Languages (redirected from Iroquoian language)

Iroquoian languages

Family of about 16 North American Indian languages aboriginally spoken around the eastern Great Lakes and in parts of the Middle Atlantic states and the South. Aside from the languages of the Iroquois Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, all originally spoken in New York, along with Tuscarora, originally spoken in North Carolina) and Cherokee (originally spoken in the southern Appalachians), the Iroquoian languages are extinct, and with the exception of Huron and Wyandot, the extinct languages are poorly documented. Iroquoian languages are remarkable for their grammatical intricacy. Much of a sentence's semantic content is bound around a verbal base, so a single very long word may constitute a fairly complex utterance.

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Iroquoian Languages 

a group of closely related North American Indian languages in the northeastern part of the USA and adjacent regions of Canada. The group includes Iroquois, Erie, Seneca, Oneida, Tuscarora, Mohawk, Huron, and Cherokee. Together with the Caddo, Pawnee, Arikara, and some other languages in the central part of the USA, the Iroquoian languages are sometimes grouped in the Iroquois-Caddoan family, which is provisionally included in the more extensive Hokan-Siouan family.

The phonetic system of the Iroquoian languages has fewer than 20 phonemes with a high percentage of vowels. Noun morphology is considerably poorer than verb morphology. The verb is polysynthetic and, in addition to a rich system of affixation, uses incorporation of the direct object. It constitutes the nucleus of the sentence. The Iroquoian languages have well-developed derivation. A syllabic writing system consisting of 85 characters, which was created in the early 19th century by an American Indian named Sequoyah, existed in Cherokee.

REFERENCES

Allen, L. “Siouan and Iroquoian.” International Journal of American Linguistics, 1931, vol. 6, nos. 3–4.
Bender, E. “Cherokee.” International Journal of American Linguistics, 1949, vol. 15, no. 3.
Holmer, N. M. The Character of the Iroquoian Languages. Uppsala, 1952.
Holmer, N. M. The Seneca Language. Uppsala-Copenhagen, 1954.

G. A. KLIMOV