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The Mashantucket Pequot are undertaking aggressive efforts to revive the language through careful analysis of historical documents containing Pequot words and comparison with extant closely related languages.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:
“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”
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“This is an approach to that universal language which men have sought in vain.”
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“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
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