UC Santa Barbara

The Wendat language, also known as Huron or Huron-Wendat, was traditionally spoken in southern Ontario and Quebec. Wendat, and its southern dialect Wyandot, is part of the larger Iroquoian language family, which includes the Six Nations languages (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora) as well as Cherokee. Due to a diaspora beginning in the mid-17th century, Wendat and Wyandot communities exist today in Quebec, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Michigan. Wendat and Wyandot are formerly sleeping, or dormant, languages, meaning that there was a complete break in intergenerational transmission of the language. Wendat proper was dormant for well over a century, yet the Wyandot dialect was last spoken in Oklahoma in the late 1960s. Both are undergoing revitalization and reclamation efforts today.

The present work is a comprehensive study of the verb morphology of this Indigenous language of Canada. Wendat is a polysynthetic language, with an elaborate set of pronominal prefixes, extensive derivational affixes, and a productive process of noun incorporation. The introductory chapter presents information about the Wendat people and their language, provides a brief overview of the Iroquoian family and scholarship pertaining to these languages, and finally, gives details about the legacy materials and methodology used for the present analysis.

Due to its dormancy, research and revitalization are based entirely upon archival records. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the language was documented extensively by missionaries, especially by those of the Jesuit order. During this time, the missionary scholars produced twelve manuscript dictionaries, three Latinate grammars and numerous ecclesiastical texts. All data presented in this study are reconstructed using comparative data from the Northern Iroquoian branch of the family.

A short outline of segmental phonology in Wendat is provided in the second chapter, and the remaining six chapters describe the morphological structure of verbs. These chapters are organized by structural positions in the verbal template. Specifically, Chapter 3 describes the minimal verb in Wendat, which consists of a verb base, a pronominal prefix, and an aspect-mood suffix. Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 each pertain to a different part of the complex verb base in Wendat, namely the prepronominal prefixes, the voice prefixes, the incorporated noun, and the derivational suffixes, respectively. The final chapter, Chapter 8, discusses the expanded aspect-mood suffixes.

This work responds both to the lack of modern linguistic research on Wendat and to the need for reference materials for language revitalization purposes. Furthermore, since Wendat (and its dialect Wyandot) constitutes its own branch in the Iroquoian family, reconstructions of Proto-Iroquoian can be further refined with the addition of these data. Finally, Wendat is known to have had linguistic (and cultural) influences on many of its sister languages, and therefore, this study could help elucidate how these languages evolved to their modern states.