Language
Historically, the Pequot spoke a dialect of the Mohegan-Pequot language, an Eastern Algonquian language. After the Treaty of Hartford concluded the Pequot War, the colonists made speaking the language a capital offense, and it became largely extinct. The Pequot from both the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation and Mashantucket Pequot speak English as their primary language.
The Mashantucket Pequot are undertaking aggressive efforts to revive the language through careful analysis of historical documents containing Pequot words and comparison with extant closely related languages. So far they have reclaimed over 1,000 words, though that is a small fraction of what would be necessary for a functional language. The Mashantucket Pequot have begun offering language classes with the help of the Mashpee Wampanoag. The latter recently initiated the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. The southern New England Native communities who are participants in the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project are Mashpee Wampanoag, Aquinnah Wampanoag, Herring Pond Wampanoag, and most recently, Mashantucket Pequot.
Read more about this topic: Pequot People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school was taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen—but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“We have tried so hard to adulterate our hearts, and have so greatly abused the microscope to study the hideous excrescences and shameful warts which cover them and which we take pleasure in magnifying, that it is impossible for us to speak the language of other men.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)