Tuscarora, sometimes called , is the Iroquoian language of the Tuscarora people, spoken in southern Ontario, Canada, North Carolina and northwestern New York around Niagara Falls, in the United States. The historic homeland of the Tuscarora was in eastern North Carolina, in and around the Goldsboro, Kinston, and Smithfield areas.
The name Tuscarora ( ) means "hemp people," after the Indian hemp or milkweed, which they use in many aspects of their society. refers to the long shirt worn as part of the men's regalia, and so the name literally means "long shirt people."
In the mid-1970s, 50 people spoke it on the Tuscarora Reservation (Lewiston, New York) and the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation (near Brantford, Ontario). The Tuscarora School in Lewiston has striven to keep Tuscarora alive as a heritage language by teaching children from pre-kindergarten to sixth grade.
The Tuscarora language is polysynthetic. The language is written using mostly symbols from the Roman alphabet, with some variations, additions, and diacritics.
Phonology
Vowels
Tuscarora has four oral vowels, one nasal vowel, and one diphthong. The vowels can be either short or long, which makes a total of eight oral vowels, , and two nasal vowels, . Nasal vowels are indicated with an ogonek, long vowels with either a following colon or an interpunct , and stressed vowels are marked with an acute accent . The pronunciation of unstressed short vowels varies between dialects, as shown in the following tables:
Thus in the official writing system of Tuscarora, the vowels are a e í u ę. The marginal phonemes ą and o occur in loanwords.
Consonants
The Tuscarora language has ten symbols representing consonants, including three stops (, , and ), three fricatives (, , and ), a nasal (), a rhotic (), and two glides ( and ). These last four can be grouped together under the category of resonants. (Mithun Williams, 1976) The range of sounds, though, is more extensive, with palatalization, aspiration, and other variants of the sounds, that usually come when two sounds are set next to each other.
There may also be the phonemes (written as p) and (written as f), although they probably occur only in loan words. The phonemic consonant cluster is realized as a postalveolar fricative . The marginal phonemes l and m occur in loanwords.
Stops
Tuscarora has three stops: , , and ; in their most basic forms: , , and . could be considered separate, although it is very similar to , and can be counted as a variant phonetic realization of these two sounds. Each sound has specific changes that take place when situated in certain positions. These are among the phonetic (automatic) rules listed below. Since, in certain cases, the sounds and are realized, a more extended list of the stops would be , , , , and . In the written system, however, only t, k, and ′ are used. is aspirated when it directly precedes another .
Fricatives and affricates
The language has two or three fricatives: , , and . and are distinguished only in some dialects of Tuscarora. Both are pronounced , but in some situations, is pronounced . is generally . There is an affricate is .
Resonants
Resonants are , , , . A rule (below) specifies pre-aspiration under certain circumstances. The resonants can also become voiceless fricatives (as specified below). A voiceless is described as "a silent movement of the tongue accompanied by an audible escape of breath through the nose." When becomes a voiceless fricative, it often sounds similar to .
Automatic rules
V = a vowel
C = a consonant
R = a resonant
# = the beginning or end of a word
Ø = sound is dropped
followed by or sometimes often becomes .
Used here is a type of linguistic notation. Aloud, the first bullet point would read, " becomes when preceded by ."
Morphology
Verbs
The basic construction of a verb consists of
prepronominal prefixes
pronominal prefixes
the verb base
aspect suffixes
in that order. All verbs contain at least a pronominal prefix and a verb base.
Prepronominal prefixes
These are the very first prefixes in a verb. Prepronominal prefixes can indicate tense direction location In addition, these can mark such distinctions as dualic, contrastive, partitive, and iterative. According to Marianne Mithun Williams, it is possible to find some semantic similarities from the functions of prepronominal prefixes, but not such that each morpheme is completely explained in this way.